Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
I'm going to give about half of this presentation, and then Fiona Cook will continue. She is our director of business and economics and has been involved in this issue for too many years.
We represent 45 chemical-producing companies across the country. It's a $47 billion industry. The reason we're here today and the reason this issue is so important to us is that 80% of our products are shipped by our very fine railways, CP and CN. So we have a very huge interest in this bill. We're also a member of the Coalition of Rail Shippers, and have been for the last seven years.
Why is rail so important to our industry? In a recent meeting with members of Parliament like yourselves, one of our members, a large petrochemical producer, was talking about investment and growth and job creation in this country. He said basically there are only two major issues that affect a big investment: you have to have feedstock, which in our case is natural gas liquids, and you have to have rail service—rail service that's not only available, but is price-competitive, because most of our product goes to the U.S. on very long-haul rail shipping. If we can't ship it efficiently and at a good price through Canada and to the United States, we can't build and we can't even maintain our plants. This is really important to our industry.
Our members do appreciate that we have two large and very good North American railways in this country. We do appreciate the efforts that have been made to improve the service of our railways. It's something that is very important to us, and it's the reason we support this bill.
We do believe, however, that the fundamental requirements for a good partnership between railways and our sector and shippers is to have service agreements that are clear and reciprocal, where both parties work together to achieve the best possible performance. We don't really want a system that is heavily regulated, nor do we want a system that requires a steady stream of appeals.
Our associations and members really appreciate the fact that this bill is a significant step forward in providing for those service agreements, something we've been looking for, for a long time, and we believe this will be a better foundation for our companies to work with railways, which do have market power that is not always equivalent to a fully competitive economy.
We also believe that a well-crafted act will benefit the railways in their working relationship with customers, such as our industry. Our association supports this bill, but we also believe that in order to make a difference and to achieve the objective of providing service agreements that are workable, the legislation needs to be improved. In fact, we believe there is a substantial risk that without a clearer definition of service agreements in the draft act, both our companies and the railways will be mired in some confusion as to what a service agreement is, and we'll end up with an endless number of appeals that will not be in the interest of our companies or of the railways.
To conclude, we will support this act, but we believe it could be made more workable with modest amendments that will define service agreements better and that will in turn help the government and Parliament achieve the aims of this act.
Fiona Cook will provide you with an example of the amendments we would like to see.