I hope that before the minister leaves the table we'll have an opportunity to canvass committee members as to whether or not they'd be interested in inviting CN at its earliest possible opportunity to appear before the committee.
Chair, you can take a couple of minutes from the end of my time if you wish to do that.
I just want to return to a couple of items here. First of all, just to review what we've heard here today, the last time this committee asked about the number of inspectors, there were about 100. There are now 117. The TDG directorate was at 35, and we now hear it's at 94. So the amount of oversight has gone up dramatically. We also know that oil by rail went from 173,000 cars in 2013 down to 140,000 last year, so the ratio of oversight has been improving dramatically since the Auditor General last had a report on activities here.
Regarding some of the arcane stuff about the estimates, we've heard a lot about the idea of a cut. An actual cut is a dollar spent on a specific purpose that isn't being spent on that purpose any longer. That would be an operational cut. What they call a capital cut, which happens when a dollar originally invested in a capital investment is no longer being spent, is not a cut, is it?
In the case of grants and contributions, if people don't apply for a program and the money is not spent, that's not a cut, is it?