The additional piece of this is actually about price transparency. If we look at the U.S. model, which is similar to ours, in a sense, it's an open market.
This is not about a wheat board; this is actually about information flows. In an open market, the only way you can make a business decision and enter a contract is to have certain information. If it's information that's privileged and kept by companies that say they will refuse to give it to you—for instance, the price at export, because certain companies are privately held—then how do you make your transaction?
In the U.S., the USDA comes out with a weekly report. It actually reports the number of vessels in port. It reports on the price. It reports on the sales. It reports on the basis. It reports on the unloads. Why does it do all of that? It does all of that so that the market can be open and people can make a decision. When it comes time to sell, I can decide to sell now because the price seems to be higher and the basis seems to be lower, or I can decide to hold my grains because the basis is higher and the price seems to be lower. That's instead of me having to guess or to search everywhere under the sun and maybe get the information or maybe not.
As we've seen the basis widen, I've used numbers that lots of folks have told me are not quite accurate. Others have used other numbers that folks have told them are maybe closer or maybe not so close. In an open market, you actually have a bid price and a buy price. When you go to the stock exchange to buy a stock, you actually know what the price is, and you know what you can sell it at, because that's a seller's price. Surely we want farmers, when they're selling, to have information that should be publicly available.
Basically what we're saying here is that if we actually want this to be transparent, let's use the Grain Commission to simply make the prices transparent so that you have one place, similar to a stock exchange, to go look for the pricing. That's really all you're doing. You're not actually telling folks what to do. You're not saying you can bring this much here and then, unlike the previous amendment, which talked a little bit about respecting the rights of grain producers to deliver grain, it has nothing to do with delivery. This is just price transparency so that you can make a decision as an elevating company or a transport company or a grain farmer. In this particular case, you actually know what the prices are and you can make your decision based on that information.
It's that simple, Mr. Chair; it's not any more complicated than that. I think in an open market, you would actually want that type of information to make an informed decision. Otherwise the information may actually start to change. Trying to find the Port of Vancouver price is not a simple one. Some of the private grain operators don't post their price. When you sell to them, you have no idea other than somebody might tell you that they hear the price is x.
This will actually open it up. I don't think my friends across the way would suggest that the U.S. isn't an open market, and that's exactly what they do with price transparency. They had what we have now, and farmers realized that even when they decided to put competition on the northern piece of rail going to the west coast, the railroaders just simply split the basis difference between themselves. This put an end to it, because now there was transparency in pricing.
That's really all it's trying to do, Mr. Chair. It's simply to get some information into the hands of those who want to enter into a contractual arrangement, whatever that arrangement happens to be. It's their call to make. They just need to have information to make I think more informed decisions.