As Greg says, we currently have regulated interswitching at a very small distance, 30 kilometres. Greg's suggestion of 500 kilometres or what the government is proposing, 160 kilometres, would allow regulated interswitching to be more available to shippers. Also, it gives the opportunity for a shipper to use interswitching as leverage to get a better price with a competing...with this host railway. I don't think that's well understood.
The railways are pushing back very hard on extended interswitching in the media in the last few weeks. They are putting out, I call it, alternative facts that there are going to be job losses and that American carriers are going to eat Canadian carriers' lunch. Those things are scare tactics by the railways.
The biggest cutter of jobs in the rail industry is the railways themselves. CP cut 6,000 jobs when Keith Creel got there. CN cut 1,800 jobs at the beginning of the pandemic. They complain that there are not enough workers to fill the jobs currently because a lot of the service issues are lacking crews to man locomotives. It's ironic that extended interswitching is going to create job losses when they can't fill the positions they currently have.
As far as competition goes and the U.S. carriers taking away Canadian traffic, if the railways say that Canadian railways have the lowest rates in the world, how is it that a foreign carrier is going to take away traffic when Canadian carriers have the lowest rates? Even if someone takes away that traffic through interswitching, all the host carrier has to do is offer the same rate and they keep the traffic.
A lot of the rhetoric we're hearing from the rail industry, frankly, doesn't make any sense.