Yes, the bare freight rates are among the lowest in the world. It depends how you do the measurement. Some work was done, and I think it was by a transportation institute in Australia some years ago, that compared the freight rates in a whole lot of countries. Of course, they were all put into the same currency in that study, into U.S. dollars, and at the time--and that was in the mid-1990s--given the exchange rate on Canadian dollars, the Canadian bare freight rates were, I think, the lowest in the world; the U.S. was second.
But that isn't the whole story. You would expect in a country of large geography like ours that the freight rates would tend to be low. There are more charges associated with the terminal activities--they tend to be expensive--and less with the line haul, so the longer the line haul in terms of average freight rates, they would be fairly low. But it means the total freight bill can be relatively high, because we have such big geography in this country. Then there is the issue of all the ancillary charges we talked about that are also charges the shipper has to pay.
I've never seen a study that has included all those issues, but to some extent the lowest freight rates are a bit of a smokescreen.