I actually have a handout. There's not a lot of text in it, but I'm going to be referring to it as we go through.
First off, I would like to thank Minister Ritz and Minister Lebel for their work in putting this legislation forward. I'd also like to recognize Minister Strahl and Rob Merrifield for the work they did previous to that. I'd also like to thank the opposition members who have taken a keen interest in this bill and reached out to many stakeholders: Ms. Chow, Mr. Allen, Mr. Aubin, and Mr. Goodale.
Farmers are not the direct shippers. We don't actually do this freight stuff ourselves, but everything that goes on, or anything that goes wrong in our grain handling and transportation system, flows back down and affects our bottom lines very directly. So I would like to walk you through very simply what challenges we face and what we're talking about as farmers.
If you could go to the first two pictures, you'll see that they are of grain bins and barns and lots of snow around them. What happens is that we get a call to deliver grain. There's a train coming next week. We need put 5,000 tonnes of number one hard red spring wheat into this elevator to hit the train. That's what happens to the farmer who gets those phone calls. So we say, well, what day is the train going to be there? It's Tuesday. So we go there and start up our tractors and we clean all the snow away. We thaw out our auger engines and we get everything ready to ship grain. So the first two pictures are just of snowbanks and then in the next two pictures you see what it's like to try to move the snow in our yards in many parts of western Canada in the wintertime. Again, this takes a day's work just to get ready to ship the grain.
We do all of that work, and then you will see in picture number five us loading the grain with a grain vac into the truck that we will use to take it to the grain elevator. That's in the wintertime. Sometimes we get calls in the spring or the fall to deliver grain. Here's a photo if you're harvesting and you have you and your spouse or a hired man and you're out combining and delivering grain. Some farmers only have one good grain truck, and if you're using that at harvest time, then you either have to hire a custom trucker to come in to move that grain to the elevator and book that freight to do that, or you have to take the truck off the combine to haul grain to the elevator. Some farmers will have more than enough trucks, and some of the larger scale farmers might be able to do both at the same time, but for many farmers that's not a realistic option.
When you're rushing around on your farm, shown in picture number seven, it never fails that this is what happens when you're rushing and trying to get home to load grain and run the combines at the same time. That's actually what happened to this particular individual. He sent me a photo of it.
The other things that can happen, as you will see on the next page, are when you're busy seeding. Again, a lot of farmers only have one really good truck, and that's the truck you use to bring fertilizer or seed to your air seeder or your drill when planting. Again, if you have to haul grain during seeding time, you either have to stop and use the truck for that or you again have to hire a custom trucker to come in and do all that.
So you've gone through all this work whether you've cleaned snow or arranged for somebody to come in your busy times to haul that grain.
If you go to the next picture, there's a picture of Weyburn Inland Terminal, a big, successful farmer-owned terminal. That's the newer concrete ones. On the next page—page 10—you'll see an elevator at Coronach, Saskatchewan. What happens is that if the train doesn't come, the elevator fills up, and what you see is a big line of trucks forming. So now you're sitting there in the line with your truck and it's a busy time of year and you're saying, well, should I just turn around and go home and unload this truck, or should I wait in line? Is the train coming, or isn't it coming? This is the sort of stuff that can happen. Or you get up really early in the morning and you get in line first only to find out there's no room to unload the trucks.
These are the sorts of things that back right up to the farm gate and cause farmers a lot of consternation when the rail service and the trains aren't there on time.
The next two pictures are photos of elevators with fully loaded cars of grain. That's what we do want to see. The railways do haul a lot of grain for us every year. The challenge is that it's not always on a timely basis. For example, there are spot prices. If Japan is out in the market buying a lot of wheat, for example, and they want to pay a premium price, or Turkey wants to buy lentils at a premium price, there are spot prices to take into account. And if a grain company bids on that, they want to be sure that they can get the rail transportation to get it to the port on time, to get to the boat on time, to get to the customer's mill on time. If there's a risk of penalties from the customer because you didn't get it there in time, or you're going to pay a lot of demurrage at port for a boat to sit there, then all of that comes back into a lower price for the farmer because the grain company doesn't have that much margin. So they will say, well, we'll pay the farmer less money to allow for these probable costs that we'll absorb along the way.
So at the end of the day it all does come back down to the farmer, and we're the ones who suffer when things don't work properly.
Again, thank you very much for the chance to be here and I look forward to the questions and answers.