Thanks to the witnesses for coming.
I'm from Medicine Hat. The CP goes right through my riding.
Quite frankly, Mr. Creel, I used to work in the private sector. I worked for a company called Methanex—before that, it was Novacor Chemicals, and before that, it was Alberta Gas Chemicals—and I can tell you that when I worked for that organization, we always had trouble with CP, trouble to get them to get their cars and trouble to get them to move their cars.
After I left that organization, I worked with a number of different organizations, with some of the petrochemicals, fertilizers, carbon black, green growers, and so on, and they wanted to get together and talk about what the problems were. I did that, and we identified that they all had the same problems. CP was not servicing their organizations. They weren't getting their cars. They weren't delivering their cars.
This is not new for me. This goes back a long way. Every year I hear from organizations, particularly from the grain farmers over the last couple of years since I have been a member of Parliament, that they're not getting their cars. That's one of the things I'd like to get out on the table.
As I understand it, CP actually dropped something like 400 engines and some 2,000 cars out of their system in this last year. If you had kept those engines and kept those cars, I'm wondering.... I don't know what kinds of cars they were; obviously, there are all kinds of different products. However, that could have meant putting more trains on the rails, even with shorter trains—because I understand the issue in terms of cold weather—to potentially get to market some of the grain that hasn't reached there.
I'm wondering if you have any comments on that.