Until the act was introduced, I feel that the government’s intention was to strongly encourage the parties to find a solution. I sat on Mr. Dinning’s committee, after all. We had a couple of dozen meetings in which we tried to reach a business solution on the matter. The issue that some shippers had was that they preferred to wait for legislation that would impose a higher standard, rather than negotiating.
But you don’t have to worry. At the moment, we are inviting all our customers, big ones, small ones and medium-sized ones to sit down with us to come to a service agreement that will include hours of service, the number of switch windows per week, the number of cars and, if possible, a guaranteed minimum level of traffic. Then there will be discussions about the consequences if we do not meet our mutual obligations.
You can be sure that this is not being done in a vacuum. At the moment, we have a number of agreements with a number of customers. As I said earlier, all Canadian ports have information and service exchange agreements governing what is going through those ports.