You know what? I'm going to answer all your questions, because I think it's a good opportunity to explain, from our point of view in Transport Canada, what our analysis is of what has occurred.
In order to learn how to fix going forward, you have to understand the problem, and there seems to be a focus on amendments to the Fair Rail Freight Service Act from last year, which is a different conversation, and not the one that addresses our problem here right now.
The railways provide a capacity for a normal year, a five-year average, and they do so when they're putting their business plans together. Unfortunately, and fortunately, because this is a two-sided coin here, we have a great harvest and the farmers did extraordinarily well in bringing in production. We do expect that rail should have the capacity to have a surge, a swing, on how much they can provide.
That was exacerbated by the weather we've seen this year. Minus 25 degrees and below causes trains to have to be shortened, and there are concerns with respect to the health and safety of people working in operations.
We ended up having the situation of a huge crop, 33% more, which, if you take a look at it, is 20 million tonnes more than we normally see. That would mean 10 million tonnes for each railway to carry, because they're about fifty-fifty in grain in the country. That exceeds the entire potash industry, for example, in one year, in one fell swoop.
As for what we've done, we met with the CN and CP CEOs on Saturday and went through what they can do and how many cars they can move. They understand the urgency. Of course, I have met with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and I've met with the grain companies.
The Fair Rail Freight Service Act was passed last year for the purpose of having shippers and railways communicate with each other in order to ensure that we have a smooth system. That legislation has not been utilized by grain or by the railways up to this point, and that's a difficulty. We'd like to see that utilized. More importantly, we'd like to see the railways start accelerating how much they're moving in the Prairies right now, and they've indicated that they would do so.