I'm glad that you mentioned Chicago. It's true that CN bought a line to get around Chicago. That was because 70% of all rail traffic in the United States touches Chicago. There's a bottleneck going right through Chicago. Twice a day, freight rail is held up—45 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon—to allow commuters to go through. They've initiated a public-private partnership called CREATE. They've sought investment from the federal government, from state governments, and from railways. Railways have contributed upward of $200 million already. There are investments in signalling, track, and overpasses and underpasses. All of this is designed so that goods can move more quickly and more freely, recognizing that this has an impact on the whole country. They've done studies. They've shown the economic impact right from the ports all the way to the receiving companies in the east of the country.
If I were to take that example and apply it to Canada—in fact, I should commend the Government of Canada. Some years ago, when we started to see a lot of Asian trade, we had mostly containers coming into the country, and we had a great deal of difficulty dealing with them. Working together in a collaborative fashion, working on a commercial basis, we were able to initiate the Asia-Pacific gateway project, and we have greatly increased our capacity at the port of Vancouver, at Deltaport,and of course, in Prince Rupert. It's that kind of collaboration.
I'm not calling for a specific infrastructure fund, but what I would like to see is the government perhaps starting to paint a picture of what the supply chain is today and what they think it's going to be when we have $650 billion in investments in mining, forestry, and agriculture. It's more of a call to realize that we are going to see exponential growth and we need to be ready for it as a society.
By the way, on grain shipments, my colleague sent me a note saying that grain is at 90% on-time performance this year.