Thanks again, Luc. You're exactly right.
Tyler, you touched on it. I remember speaking in the House about this last September and October; we did want to work across the floor. We adamantly supported splitting the rail transportation off of Bill C-49. We would move it through. I think if that had been the case, we would have caught some of these proposed amendments that you're bringing forward, like the long-haul interswitching and those types of things. If it had been a separate bill, we could have addressed some of these points then, but because it's such a huge bill, it's now stuck in the Senate on something that has nothing to do with what we are talking about right now. That's the frustrating part of this entire discussion.
I like to think that when we went through this in 2013-2014 as the government, we knew what we were facing. Bill C-30 would have addressed some of these issues in good faith. We said, “We're warning you that this is going to happen, so let's try to address it.” It is frustrating for us, but it's more frustrating for you as producers and stakeholders that you're having to go through this again when there was opportunity to try to fix this situation.
Rick, you brought up an interesting point that I think we missed out on, and it's a fact that Tyler brought up too: we're missing markets that we may have had. We're not getting a premium for our product, because on the international trade market when we're talking about our producers and we want agriculture to have a $75-billion trade business, which is fantastic, we're taking away every possible tool for our producers to be able to reach those types of goals.
Can you touch on the fact that we are not getting a premium for our product because we are no longer a reliable trading partner because we cannot meet our sales deadlines because we can not get our product to market?