There's certainly been a lot of rhetoric about this. Interswitching has been used in Canada since the 1900s. Railways are consistently switching the locomotives or train cars. Actually, every shipment that goes to the port of Vancouver, whether it's CP or CN, ultimately gets put on a CN locomotive to go over the bridge. Those 160 kilometres are a good start; however, it will handle only about 90% of grain handling facilities. It misses massive growing regions of our country, such as northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan. Interswitching is the only tool we have, with the duopoly of class 1 railways, to incentivize any competition.
The key part of interswitching is not its use; it's that the threat of its use allows shippers to negotiate with their originating carrier to try to get a better rate and better service.
The other one around labour is that there is an agreement among the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that says that U.S. crews cannot come up into Canada and Canadian crews cannot go into the United States. Every railway that's running in Canada is run by a Canadian union crew. There are a lot of myths out there. I'd say a lot has been dramatized for dramatic purposes.