Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate this opportunity to have this dialogue with you, Mr. Emerson. I want to welcome you to the committee.
I know a focus of the report is around interswitching, so I'm going to start with some of my questions around interswitching. On page 165 of the report, the review recommends that the Government of Canada allow the extended 160-kilometre interswitching limits to sunset.
I want to ask you a little about that. This is the second day of our study. We've heard from some producers, and I've heard from individuals in my riding since the report was made public—my riding is a very large rural riding—that they are concerned that this was a recommendation within this report, specifically, I guess, because of the changing landscape in the Prairies when it comes to the number of places where you can load or unload your grain. One of the members from the CTA on Tuesday stated that interswitching is a tool used to address a market failure.
First, would you define what happened in 2013 as a market failure or just simply a number of extraordinary events coming together to create the pressure we saw in the Prairies when it came to moving grain?
Second, would you comment on the changing landscape, and why you thought it appropriate to recommend the sunset of this length of interswitching.