Thank you very much for that question.
I take you back to the foundation upon which we developed our thinking on transportation issues, and that was to look out 25 to 30 years. The interswitching debate is really a very narrow debate because interswitching, as you know, applies only to certain provinces and only applies to grain. It is an attempt to add a dimension of competition into a system that, to be very blunt, is rife with power imbalances between major service providers and small shippers.
Throughout the transportation system, not just in rail, there is an enormous range of issues that involve near monopolies, or natural monopolies as they're referred to. You do get a tremendous amount of friction in the system that results from power imbalances between service providers and their customers. Interswitching is one small tool to help the agricultural sector around that.
Our view was that, yes, we should have provisions for interswitching, but over time, and I'm talking about over decades. We really should be not just focusing on interswitching as it relates to grain, or as it relates to three provinces; we need to look at interswitching in a larger sense.
Part of the recommendations of the report call for a re-mandating of the Canadian Transportation Agency, and an enhanced resource base for the agency so that the agency could make determinations across a whole range of shippers who feel they are disadvantaged by their local situation or local service provider, and give the agency the flexibility to mandate interswitching. It could be 160; it could be more than that or less than that. Ideally, it should probably cover other commodities as well. Our view was that the 160 is arbitrary. It's narrow in terms of public policy considerations forward and it should be broadened.