I appreciate the questions.
I think it shows that everybody's very concerned with respect to what's happening right now. As I said, it's hard to read the stories about farmers who are having difficulties with cashflow. It's hard to read those stories because they have done so well. They have provided wonderful bounty for us, as you pointed out, and the frustration is there about moving it in the short term.
Perhaps I could focus on short term and long term. In the short term, we do have a serious matter because we do have what's going to be a carry-over into the next year. The laws of physics mean that you can only move a certain amount of grain in a certain amount of time based upon what infrastructure the rail has. They do understand the issue. They understand the problem.
Minister Ritz has been meeting with officials for weeks. I have been meeting with officials at the railways as well. What we need is for them to tell us what the highest capacity they can run is, and that they do run that capacity. That's the way, in the short term, we can move the grain and work with the elevators and work with the terminals and work with the ports to ensure that this moves as smoothly as possible, so we don't have a situation where we have 200 cars sitting on a siding waiting to go into a terminal because they're waiting for a different train to come in as well, because those orders have to go out first.
The chain has to have capacity. The chain has to have direction. Those are the things that you work with in terms of operations with those two entities, the grain companies as well as the rail companies.
In the longer term, if I may, what it has shown is that we do have a constriction in our supply chain that wasn't able to deal with two things: an increased amount, and weather with intensity that we had not seen before in terms of operations.
One of the things that came out of the Fair Rail Freight Service Act was that we would set up a commodity supply chain table and ensure that there would be discussions there and that there would be another group that came out of Agriculture to deal with grain as well. Those tables have to work and they have to work together. For a hundred years there has been this tension between railways and grain companies because everybody wants it shipped as fast as possible, and it is the government's role to give good policy overall to smooth that out and ensure that the producers do get their grain to market, that they do get their product to market as well. We're setting up the table, which we'll be announcing soon, from the Fair Rail Freight Service Act. As well we're working with the companies now.
As Minister Ritz pointed out in the House yesterday, all options are being considered right now, just because of the real impact it's having on farmers in the west, and the real concerns. When we come to a position on the options we have before us, we'll be in a place to be able to announce those, and that's not right now.