Thank you to the witnesses for appearing this evening. Time is always the enemy here, so I'll try to be as brief as I can.
Mr. Mongeau, tonight you've made reference to other parties in the value chain who aren't performing up to the standard that would be necessary to move this crop. I wonder if you could be a little more specific about exactly where the failures are. Is it in the country? Is it only at port? Is it a failure of planning? Is it a failure of coordination? Is there not enough data available? Is the system not being properly monitored so you can get the hard facts and make decisions based on the things you've actually measured?
I think it would be helpful to us if you could—if not tonight in two or three minutes, in a more detailed form—lay out where you think the others in the system are not pulling their weight. That would be useful for us to know.
Mr. Creel, for your part, I was struck by a speech that your CEO gave in New York about a month ago in which he indicated that CP was particularly sensitive—that was his word, sensitive—to some kinds of movements, intermodal in particular, where if you miss a delivery date, you miss and you lose the business because somebody else picks it up. But that same kind of sensitivity, to use Mr. Harrison's words, did not apply to coal and grain, because essentially they had no alternatives, and sooner or later the railways would move that grain anyway. Yes, it would be inconvenient to farmers, but not inconvenient to railways because they would get all the revenue and be paid in any event.
I think you would appreciate what a negative message that delivered on the Prairies, where farmers were being told that CP was not “sensitive” to their issue, and their issue was described as a “modest” problem. Farmers would think that a multi-billion dollar grain shipping failure is something more than modest.
I just wonder if you can indicate how CP can get past this rather negative messaging to farmers, and find a way forward here that really doesn't say to them, “Look. Don't you ever dare grow another bumper crop, because we can't handle it.”
Farmers want to be thinking in terms of growth and expansion, and meeting world markets, and they'd rather not be told that this is really beyond the capacity of the Canadian system to cope with. Just be average, just be an average crop. The system can handle that, but anything more than an average, forget about it, because the system can't cope with it.