This map will look different from the description of the excluded corridors, but realistically any shipper in that area that's shipping traffic to the Vancouver area, to terminate on a rail siding there, would not be able to use this. We can draw a very similar map for Quebec to show that some of the most captive shippers in the northern part of that province will have exactly the same problem, because their only connection to any other carrier will be in that Quebec-Windsor corridor.
Quite apart from these things, though, one of the underlying issues that WCSC has with this remedy is that it will fundamentally succeed or fail with the willingness of any one of the railways to act as a connecting carrier and to compete for that traffic using long-haul interswitching. Just like its predecessor the CLR, that can make or break that remedy. We haven't seen any willingness to do that, to compete using CLR since the early 1990s, and we don't see anything in the long-haul interswitching remedy that changes that dynamic.
On top of that, the scope of traffic that's eligible for long-haul interswitching, geographically as well as in other respects, is much narrower than what could theoretically take advantage of competitive line rates.
Third, there are a number of hurdles built into this remedy that don't currently exist with CLR.
From that perspective, and given the experience with CLR, even though we may have seen some willingness to compete up to 160 kilometres under the Bill C-30 regime, we haven't seen anything beyond that. CLR has been on the books that entire time. We're concerned that we're not going to see what is really required, which is a willingness to compete on the part of CN and CP—certainly in western Canada the majority of interchanges is between those two carriers—that is necessary to make a remedy like this work.
Yes, the requirement for an agreement with the connecting carrier is taken away, but the fact that people haven't been able to get that agreement is really just a symptom of that underlying, more fundamental issue, which is that CN and CP have “declined to compete”. Those, I want to make sure you know, are not my words. Those are the words of the statutory review report that was issued in 1992. They were repeated in 2001, and I think there was also something along those lines in the most recent report.