The same situation has happened across the whole Wheat Board area, as we've seen.
The Wheat Board has this idea that any processing has to be done at the point of sale, not at the origin of the commodity. Canola crushing has put the lie to that. Can-Oat has put the lie to that. Everybody else does it so that the transportation becomes part of the finished cost. It certainly makes a huge difference to farmers' bottom lines. The most any of us pay on our farms for input expenses is transportation. I know the board crows a lot about the great deals they've done with CN and CP. Rightly or wrongly, I'm still paying way more in transportation than I should, because I'm not allowed to value add.
When I put durum in a bin, which I have to do under the Wheat Board system now, I notify the board that I want to make pasta out of it at my own facility, if I have one, and I have to do a buyback from them. I pay freight and elevation charges to port, even if it hasn't left my bin. Then I go back to them, and they might be paying me eight dollars. I'll use round numbers. At the same time, they'll come back and say they want me to pay twelve dollars, when it hasn't left my bin yet. They'll ask for 12 dollars for that 5,000 bushels of durum, and then you pay the freight and elevation to port—they'll set that number—and then you can finally do what you want with your own durum.
It's no wonder people have torn out their hair and thrown up their hands and have built across the line in North Dakota. That's where our durum is going. All those jobs are sliding south. Most of Canada's durum ends up in Italy via the pasta trade of American brokers. We don't even sell it directly, which is ridiculous.
That is going to change.