Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure to be back here.
I think probably one of the reasons I'm here is that in the last several months, OmniTRAX Canada has put forward a proposal to move sweet crude through the Port of Churchill. Obviously that raises some of the concerns that I think are being addressed by the committee.
I'll give you just a brief overview. OmniTRAX is a North American operation. We run 17 rail companies and two ports in North America. We're the largest independently owned private rail company in North America.
In Canada we have three basic rail assets — the Hudson Bay Railway that runs from The Pas to Churchill, the Carlton Trail into Saskatchewan, and a little piece of the Kettle Falls in southern British Columbia. I think it's important I'm here with Dave today, because Hudson Bay, our railway to Churchill, is federally regulated, and yet our Carlton Trail is regulated provincially, so we do see both sides of it.
We're a full-service provider into northern Manitoba and, indeed, northern Canada. We provide freight services. We provide fuel resupply. We obviously handle a lot of grain, and we are also the resupply area for the Nunavut-Hudson Bay area, so we have lots of interest in part of the discussions that are taking place today.
Through our freight services, basically we offer our clients road, rail, port, and marine. We are working on an air agreement with one of our contractors in the north.
We do run a marine tank farm at Churchill. Basically with the resupply we do into the northern communities and into Nunavut, we have four tanks with ten million litres of capacity each, and the commodities we deal with are gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and aviation fuel.
Obviously when people look at the Port of Churchill in particular, they look at the benefits of distribution. Although I don't have a chart I can share with you, I can tell you shipping out of the Port of Churchill to places like Rotterdam, Liverpool, and Oslo can create as much as three to three and a half days' savings for the exporter, so that's a substantial amount of money to them, and that also provides us with a greater opportunity to the bigger market.
To review quickly, last year we shipped 640,000 metric tons of grain through the port. People ask me about the impact of the Wheat Board. We have gone from basically having two shippers into the Port of Churchill to having five. We're hoping this year we'll have seven. That has created some interest for other shippers to take a look at us and see what we can do and are prepared to do.
We obviously have lots of opportunity for diversification, but I think, with regard to the study, I'm going to focus on crude oil through the north, and obviously on where we're situated with the Bakken development in southeast Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Something I didn't realize until I got involved in this is that when we talk about shipping east or west or north or south, Canadian oil companies don't get the full value by shipping into the U.S. They only get the full value by shipping export into the world markets. I'm told that about $30 billion is missed over a five-year period simply because we have to accept a price that is different from the world price. So it does make a substantial change in people's thinking as far as how they can ship and how they can benefit going through the Port of Churchill.
Our proposal was to do a test pilot in which we would load a million barrels of oil. For economic development, doing that creates about 25 new jobs as well as 20 in construction. Over the years, through our company, we have shipped a total of 2.354 million barrels of petroleum product, and I'm proud to say that we've done it without any incident. I think that's something that speaks to our safety record. In the last three years, on any of our products that we are moving to the north, we've had no derailments on our main line.
So to talk about the safety parts, obviously, we've had an eye-opener. I think it's interesting, the safety culture in Canada, and in particular, I believe, in the rail. We don't start a meeting, even in our executive offices, anymore without somebody being appointed the safety supervisor. We identify somebody who has CPR. We identify the exits. We believe that if we can set that pattern for our employees, then it creates an atmosphere where everybody feels comfortable. It's something that I've seen as an important part of our issue as we move forward. No matter what we try to ship, we're going to have to do it safely, and we have to have a culture that promotes that.
With the oil in particular, and the volatility, we do have plans in place to address the emergency and security issues. We have investigated and are looking at the necessary equipment required for prevention and response, we are training staff on transfers to oversee the process, and we have oil spill response and fire emergency equipment ready to be deployed.
One of the things...and it's happened, unfortunately, since Lac-Mégantic. You know, everybody has to review their safety procedures and their standards. And looking back at what we have done and how we do it.... We will not leave unattended trains on a main track. We will lay over in protected terminal areas only. We reduce our speeds through communities. I know in provincial legislation they have a maximum speed for going through a community. From discussions with the communities that we serve, we now go through the communities at five miles an hour. I'm told that should something ever happen, at that speed it would just basically be a car going off the rail. It wouldn't be anything quite as tragic as we've seen.
One of the challenges we have, being a northern community and a northern operation, is getting material and people should there ever be an incident. In working with professional people who study this on a daily basis, we are proposing to put an initial response car on every train that we ship oil on. Basically the equipment would travel with the engine, so that our only challenge after that would be to get the people there. We recognize that moving material in an isolated northern area in northern communities does become a bit of a challenge, so having that equipment on site works to our advantage.
With the new railway regulations in regard to tank cars, we've always maintained at least two individuals on our locomotives. No locomotive is attached to one or more loaded tank cars transporting dangerous goods, and they're never left unattended. A specific number of handbrakes are always applied, and all main brakes that are on a locomotive are attached.
Now, we've engaged people who give us advice on our plans. We basically develop a business plan, an economic plan. One of the benefits that we have in Churchill is that we have a third-party organization comprising federal, provincial, and company.... When we're trying to validate our safety plans, we farm it out to a third party to come back and tell us. We believe that because it's a third party and not hired by us directly, we're getting an honest and fair assessment of what we are doing, and I think the governments feel very much the same way.
I won't go too much further. We do have a couple of recommendations, and I would suggest that although OmniTRAX is a North American company, we are Canadian-owned and operated. We're run by Manitobans. We currently in our peak season will run up to 300 employees. In northern Manitoba we're one of the major employers and more than half of our employees are first nation, Métis, or Inuit.
You've probably heard something similar to a couple of the recommendations we'll make. I respect the changes the government has proposed and brought forward. I think they're doing them for the right reasons, the right purposes.
The challenge that you have to some degree when you're working with two countries is that you have to make sure that your regulations are compatible. If they're not then it creates a real problem not only for us as a company but also, I would suggest, for all the companies that are moving product of any kind back and forth. Following up on what Dave said, we are short lines. I think based on what I've seen of other short lines and our company in particular, we do try to do things in a professional way. Obviously, because of our lack of size and lack of capacity we rely on those short runs and those short hauls. That's our investment and that's where our profit centres are.
I encourage the government. I think what you're doing is correct, but we have to be very cautious about limiting or eliminating what short-line rail companies can do for the people they serve. If we're limited in the number of our rail cars like we are this year for wheat, which to me is kind of a strange issue because we have a glut on the market but our challenge is going to be to get cars, the same could apply into the volatile products that we're looking at moving. We want to be safe, obviously, first and foremost, but we also have to be reasonable, in the sense that things happen for a various set of reasons and sometimes it's not the machine that's creating the problem but sometimes it gets blamed for it, and that's where we address the issues first.
Those would be our couple of recommendations. I look forward to any questions from the committee.