Thank you very much.
Minister, it's good to have you here once again. Just when I thought we were done with Bill C-49, I'm going to breathe some life back into it.
Long-haul interswitching was a major piece of this marquee legislation for your department. One of the issues I discussed during debate in the House and at length at committee with some of my colleagues from different parties was the need to ensure that long-haul interswitching allows for more effective and efficient transport between different regions and different industries. I saw that members of the opposition actually wrote a letter to the editor in one of my local papers, suggesting that the Maritimes were in fact being discriminated against because of certain remedies not being available for that part of the region. I don't believe that to be the case, seeing as how there are actually no class I railways in Nova Scotia, P.E.I., or Newfoundland, though, with respect to New Brunswick, at least one shipper has raised this potential issue.
I'm curious; can you reassure those watching back home that in fact this is not some slap against Atlantic Canada, and on the importance of making sure that products are moving in different regions of the country—not just western Canadian grain, for example?