There are a lot of aspects to this, sir. But the first thing I think is the time aspect. We recently had the experience of travelling to Saskatoon and finding that westbound we were held up constantly; eastbound, things were facilitated. The question of the length of sidings has not been resolved on the CN transcontinental main line, and this holds up VIA trains routinely. On the line between Montreal and Halifax, on the other hand, this has been and is being addressed.
With respect to delays otherwise, there are often delays because of, for instance, trains being concentrated on one track where there were formerly two. The Ottawa Valley line of the CN was removed, so all their trains are now run through Toronto, delaying VIA corridor service and local CN freights.
If you go back a bit to the root causes of this kind of thing, one of the problems is finance. CN has to spend its investors' money wisely, and they want a good rate of return. They have a very lengthy period of amortization in Canada for equipment--twenty years. In the case of American railways it's eight years, if I remember it correctly. This puts Canadian railways at a bit of a disadvantage in addressing problems such as those you outlined.
There is another thing. Amtrak has three things in its favour. One is a law of eminent domain, where if a railway gives it too much trouble, they can expropriate it. And they did that to Guilford on the Connecticut River valley line from Montreal to New York. There's no more problem with Guilford; they were out of the picture. Amtrak fixed the track, and then sold it to a competitor of Guilford. For quite a while they got a lot of respect out of the freight railways. That kind of thing has not happened in Canada.
Another thing that Amtrak has is a legislated mandate. There is an act, and that act gives them certain powers. One of the powers is to demand respect of the schedule, and then the sanction, which I mentioned, is the power of eminent domain.
Finally, Amtrak has better financing in the sense that the states buy into passenger services. In Canada it's a bit rare. Ontario purchased service from VIA between London and Toronto for $250,000 a year. But just the State of Michigan spends probably five or ten times that in a year.
So those are some examples, sir. I think I've answered your question in part.