For grain crops particularly, we have a whole system built that's based on elevators and on using the rail system to move the grain to ports. Compared to other countries, we have some of the longest hauls moving that grain in the world. Our competitiveness, the predictability and the efficiency that we can achieve on the rail system, particularly in making sure we can make that haul and make it effective, is really important. We need the infrastructure to do that. Transportation, ultimately, is one of the largest costs we face as far as our exports go.
With interswitching in particular, as I mentioned, we did have extended interswitching for three years. One of the things we did realize at the time was that, when we needed to make an interchange between railways, we needed those interchanges to have the infrastructure and the facilities to make sure it could be done efficiently and effectively. With increasingly longer trains, those interchanges need to be increasingly bigger.
In western Canada at the time, there were only five interchanges that could accommodate a large unit train, but there are much more interchanges that can't. It's in the bill now, and certainly there is a requirement that we need to see some investment into the interchanges that we do have in order to unlock the potential of this interswitching.
As I said, with the competitive forces we want to see, we want to see them not only for small shipments but also for large shipments. If you only have five interchanges that can handle a unit train, you're really limiting the effectiveness of a provision like that. We need to see investment in those rural areas so that we can have those larger interchanges.