Well, he was making a couple of key points last week. It was an event organized between the Canadian embassy in Japan and the Japanese embassy in Canada and the mutual chambers of commerce to discuss better connections between Canada and Japan on agricultural exports.
There were two main points. One was the extraordinary logistical challenges the port authority was having in terms of just physically bringing that volume of stuff into the area and in an environment of extraordinarily constrained labour conditions, and then getting it onto the ships and getting the ships out. He was laying out a series of innovations using technology they had embarked on that was going to try to relieve that bottleneck, but then he made the very obvious point that as you move back up east out of Vancouver and into the Rocky Mountains, you end up with these tiny umbilical links between the Prairies and world markets. The absurdity just struck me—well, not the absurdity, but the fragility of that image of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and how all of the food production in this enormous area the size of Europe is going through essentially a small number of rail lines and through a couple of passes. It's just the inherent fragility of the system that we've inherited and that we've allowed to continue. There has to be a way of reducing the bottlenecks that emerge in that system, because, as we just heard, the system buckles. Every couple of years it buckles.
Certainly the article in the Financial Post last week by Jake Edmiston suggests we're into another situation this year of not being able to be that breadbasket that our country should be.