On the last one as to whether we should prioritize transportation in NAFTA, the systems are very different. I don't think that the goal, or even an important goal of NAFTA would be to harmonize our rail transportation policy and systems. They are very, very different. I think that would be a pretty darned tall order to try to do, particularly in the current environment. I think we have enough troubles at home that I would make a priority dealing with the domestic issues that we're facing in rail transportation. There are plenty of those to go around. My whole career is built on it. I depend on these problems, so do my kids.
On the first question, whether the remedies exist for U.S. carriers, I think you would hear from American shippers that they would love to have final offer arbitration and don't. They're looking at it. They've been looking at it seriously for a number of years. They don't have it. They have a completely different system. You do have access to a rate reasonableness mechanism before the Surface Transportation Board, and it's used. It's more rule-oriented down there, not surprisingly, than our system is, but they have access to that.
They have all that data, and they have another thing. The Mississippi is a brilliant of example of this. I heard the rail carriers on Monday talking about all this alleged other competition that we have in Canada. By the way, in case they missed it, there's no river in the west that goes to Vancouver from the Prairies, so there is no river competition, but in the Mississippi you have all seven class I railways touching it, or going down that spine. You have the river traffic and you have truck traffic. That's a competitive environment. That's what it looks like when you have a bunch of players. Welcome to reality. In Canada, with a very diverse geography—and by diverse I mean topographically and by the remoteness of our industries—we just need to have a system that deals with the remedies.
If you take just LHI by way of example again, if you want to make that remedy work for people who are remote—and this is where our production facilities are, particularly in the bulk resource sector—in the grain sector these are so remote that they need a remedy, because we're not building any new railways. That is not going to happen. We cannot do that in North America, so we have to rely on the systems that we have now.
Going back to the short-line point earlier, infrastructure is very hard to come by. Giving that up, I think, is a huge mistake. Whenever we have an ability to maintain infrastructure, I think we should. I don't know that we should go to the extent of subsidizing all that activity. Somebody smarter than me is going to have to figure that out. I would definitely make the remedies that we have available for our infrastructure work in a way that makes it accessible and viable for shippers to use in those circumstances. You also heard earlier that nobody's lining up to do this stuff. We don't have hordes of shippers trying to get access to the remedies, waiting for their turn. This is the most reluctant thing they do in their business, so when they use it, it's because it's a last resort and it has to be viable.