Well, it's good for all bulk commodity shippers, not just farmers. The title is a bit of an anomaly in that it affects all bulk shippers. Even when you talk to some of the potash shippers that use Canpotex, which is a single desk, they own their own cars but they still couldn't get engines and crews to move the cars. So there was not a happy story at any one of the bulk commodity round tables that we had, and we had a number of them from coal to timber to mining, potash, oil and gas, even right through to the grain systems.
We all agree that rail has to shorten the trains, slow down for winter rates. We get all that, but then they also ran far less trains. I saw an article that said there were 28 days when there wasn't a grain car that showed up in Vancouver, yet we had over 50 boats sitting and waiting to be loaded. A few of them went out short. There wasn't anybody who cancelled a contract with the boats sitting there. There were some contracts where the shipper would phone up the company and say, “Look, we're not going to be able to touch it for three months, so don't send a boat”. There still were demurrage charges.
The problem was there, even as the railways started to pick up their game. They're now to that point where they're delivering the cars that they said they could without interfering with other bulk commodities, and we welcome that. This piece of legislation will entrench that, moving forward to the end of this crop year, to make sure they attack as much of that backlog as possible. But it also gets much more specific in that rather than just scooping the easy-to-get-to commodities, they are actually forced then to work with some of the short-line rail, some of the other catchment areas that get left behind, because in their expediency to get the most to market to measure up without paying penalties, that's what's happening.
Now the piece of legislation will get us the data—that's the most important thing—corridor by corridor, week by week, so that they can tell exactly what's being missed in all of the bulk commodities. Interswitching will give some of the guys a lot better chance at keeping one railway honest over the other, and some of the southern tier, they'll start to have the ability to use some of the railways of the U.S., which already partner with CP.
When we were doing the one round table in Calgary, as I was leaving the airport to go downtown for the meeting, we actually saw a CP train with a BNSF engine on it. I mean, they're already doing those things, so this bill actually allows that to happen in a much more expeditious way.
It's very important that, as I said, the bill was passed through the Senate last night. It will have royal assent. I'm hearing that tomorrow the Governor General will sign it, so that's great. That creates the legislative umbrella that allows us to put the regulatory package in place.
Mr. Meredith and his folks at Ag Canada have been working diligently on the regulations. Andrea Lyon and I have had good discussions with Greg and his team as to what those regulations need to be, so that we make sure that short-line rail doesn't get left out, producer cars don't get left out, all the other bulk commodities, and so on like that, are addressed. So we're working with Transport Canada to make sure those regs are as fulsome as they need to be.