There are obviously issues relating to the port infrastructure itself, and terminal capacity, and so on. There's also the issues of the infrastructure leading up to the ports—being able to access the ports and leave the ports. Those are critical to members.
The other issue that continues to arise is our rail capacity and the ability, once the goods have arrived, for example, in the port of Vancouver, to then move them from the port to points east. What we're finding is that, since the dispute that took place in Vancouver a year or so ago with the truckers, there has been an improvement. From what I'm hearing, instead of taking ten days on average for containers to be moved onto the rail, it's now taking something like five days.
But for some of our members, that's still a significant delay. What we're hearing is that the railways are allocating space on the trains to the various steamship lines. Now, having said that, I think the railways have made significant strides in trying to increase capacity, but I think it's going to continue to be an issue.
Another issue I referred to that our members face is this whole issue of visibility in the supply chain. With the issue of having your containers wait on average five days at the port to be put on a train, the problem is you don't know whether it's going to be one day or five days, so in terms of your cost in maintaining inventory and so on, you have to plan for the worst case scenario, though in fact it may take less time than that.