It gets back, Mr. Easter, to the core problem that there is an absolute capacity constraint at the west coast. We can point fingers at the railways, and I have some sympathy for what the Mining Association of Canada has said. I've sat in and talked to the people in both the mining and the lumber industries somewhat over the last two weeks on this question, and everyone did experience the same difficulties in that west coast move.
One of the difficulties with a market-only solution is that if you have a constraint, and there is only so much west coast movement, 21 million tonnes, but let's be generous and say everybody does perfectly and we go to 22 million, there are 50 million tonnes of product that have to go out. If you have a market solution, every tonne is going to bid for that west coast capacity, so we need some mechanism.
In terms of the monitoring piece, we in agriculture failed the railways in the sense that we need a better way of pegging that export number earlier. Frankly, with the cuts in Statistics Canada and everything else, those numbers were not very well refined until October. In all reasonableness, it would take them six or eight weeks to gear up even if they actually tried, yet an agronomist could have pegged that crop in August. We could have invested as a country and done some forward planning to do the head counts, and we would have known where we were with those types of volumes.
That was the role the Canadian Wheat Board played. We fed that information consistently in communication with the railways. We built that west coast export plan based on the assumption the other crops were going to move, and then we figured out how much of the rest of the crop could go east, and we accepted that much grain. Now, granted, the new solution will not be that administrative in nature, but it does have to find a way of defining how much export capacity there is, how much grain is going to want to go, and apportioning that so all the potential users have a reasonable probability of getting their share of that capacity constraint.
As you said in your opening remarks, we have learned what the absolute market solution gave us. It gave us a $100 a tonne excess basis. That's a $4.8 billion transfer from farmers to grain companies. That's not a very attractive solution.
We need to be a bit more creative in finding that solution.