That's an important question because one major issue we faced was a lack of information. There was a concerted effort on the part of Transport Canada to get stakeholders on a daily call, which was immensely helpful. However, there was a good degree of silence behind some of the negotiations taking place, and there was a lack of cohesive information. One day it was on and then one day it was off. One day there were threats of layoffs at one of the railways and the next day that was off.
Relaying that information back to our members is part of my job and it became problematic because there seemed to be this lack of transparency. Understandably, when negotiations take place we can't hear all about it, but there needs to be a mechanism to deliver that information we talked about. What could make the negotiation process better for all the stakeholders is relaying some sort of concrete information back to the affected stakeholders within a reasonable time frame.
Our members were affected by that uncertainty. Although we can't calculate it, there is definitely an uncertainty cost to the length of time that these negotiations and decisions take.
On one of the earlier questions, an improvement could be determining a timeline around these negotiations.