The information piece has a number of components. Statistics Canada does estimates of total crop production by province with an extensive survey of producers, but I'm not sure whether I agree with Richard that the problem is they're surveying producers. They have a long lag time between when they do the survey and when that information is released, and part of the problem is that the information isn't current when it finally comes out.
There probably needs to be some education of producers that these kinds of surveys are actually useful to the entire industry, because they view them with a fair bit of skepticism. As for information, we need more of it. On what you say of information available to other nations, I believe that's correct, but I really believe that the railways don't have a really good handle within their own internal systems. We can trace a ladder and know exactly where it is in the system. They seem to have the ability to not know where entire 100-car trains are at any given point in time.
If they have better information flow and services and logistics than that, they should be proving it because there seems to be precious little evidence of it at this point. In this day and age, technology should be brought to bear and we should know where every railcar is, loaded with what, at any given time.