Thank you for this invitation to speak today. We appreciate the time you're giving us with your question.
On the use of U.S. railways, the only thing we can say about it is that from 2014 to 2017, U.S. railways were used and interswitching was used to move traffic to the U.S. There is no doubt about it. It's not just a detail. It was significant volumes.
On crews and short lines, I think I understand that this kind of chain reaction between interswitching to the point where.... I would certainly say that before you get there, my sense is that the better approach is to hold on to the jobs we have now, which are moving traffic and which are the Canadian jobs we already have in place.
Most of the traffic we move goes to market. It goes to Vancouver, Rupert and the east coast for export. That traffic moves long haul. Our employees move that traffic long haul. Developing a policy that would detract from this to focus on the short move would certainly be a bit challenging at times in terms of its implementation. Frankly, I think it would reduce capacity in the supply chain if you focus the resources there instead of on the long haul.
For us, really.... I want to insist on this because Marc, in his opening remarks, indicated that we have many employees in this country. We have large investments in this country for which there is no comparison to any U.S. operator. We do this with an expectation of a return, which I think is a legitimate expectation considering that all parties in the discussion are business entities and what we're trying to achieve is essentially providing an efficient service to all our customers—to whom we have a level of service obligation.
Bear in mind that the traffic that goes to the U.S. is the most damaging, because suddenly we lose the revenue and our employees lose the work. For us, frankly, suggesting that there would be some form of compensation through employees and short lines is certainly not something that is obvious to us.