That's probably at the very heart of the story of ports and transportation. As you've noted, there's never not a need for additional infrastructure. To put it in context, about five or six years ago, the association did a study with Transport Canada of the projected growth of Canadian ports and their associated infrastructure needs. At that time, pre-CETA, we found that there was a need for about $5.8 billion worth of investment into Canadian ports—simply port infrastructure. One-third was developmental, for projected growth requirements, and two-thirds was rehabilitative, to fix the legacy infrastructure that ports had inherited.
Ports are extremely adept at coming up with a patchwork quilt of financing to manage that, and they leverage private sector financing extremely effectively, but of course any infrastructure funding that comes from the various levels of government, including the federal government, is an extremely important part of that.
In terms of how that affects our competitiveness, I've talked a lot about biases with our North American counterparts. We collaborate with them, but we also compete against them. As a measure of the effectiveness and the efficiencies we have managed to extract from our supply chain and working with our supply chain partners, we have been able to capture in some cases a greater share of cargo bound for the American Midwest. As I mentioned, that has been routed up into Prince Rupert and Vancouver, for example. That's simply a function of being efficient and working to extract efficiencies within the supply chain.
That being said, infrastructure investment is still needed. We are at risk now of starting to fall behind if we don't start investing quickly. The American ports have been investing in the tens of billions of dollars in upgrading their infrastructure to meet changes in global supply chains and transportation routes with the advent of larger, deeper ships. The American ports have been able to invest a lot more than we have. We are eagerly looking forward to opportunities like the Canada infrastructure bank, as well the trade and transportation corridor fund from Transport Canada, to help us keep up in that area.