Let me first speak to your comment on deregulation. If we had not had deregulation, we would be in a major crisis today. Since deregulation, we have invested more than twice as much as we ever invested under regulation.
Under the regulatory regime, it just didn't make any business sense to invest, because you couldn't get a reasonable return on the capital from the investment. So one of the major successes of deregulation has been that it's opened up the investment climate, and it's resulted in huge investments in the last 10 years particularly. We're investing at levels that were unheard of back in the time of the regulated railway business.
Just coming around to your question, capacity is a major ongoing issue for us. If you look across the system, there are two places where we still have some room to play. There is the Maritimes, on both the port side and the rail side. We're not bumping up against the capacity numbers yet, thank heaven. The opening of Prince Rupert on the west coast has allowed for some capacity growth above and beyond what we're able to do.
Again, capacity is not simply a railway issue; capacity is a system issue. The ports have to be right. The terminal operators have to be right. The railways have to be right. The inland terminals have to be right. The trucking industry has to be right in terms of all the things they do. The border has to work. All of those things have to happen. If any one of those things doesn't happen, we are starting to get into problems.
The great benefits of the productivity improvements that you've seen in the last 10 years have been reductions in rates and, frankly, a better product for the shipper compared to what they used to get. Having said that, it also means that we're having to operate the system much closer to the margin in order to achieve the returns on investment that are necessary for us to attract the capital out of the marketplace. So that's a real issue, and it's an ongoing issue. There's no doubt about it.