Thank you, Mayor Pond. I appreciate that.
Mr. Hall, I'd only ever heard “cash is king”, but you mentioned “cargo is king”. That's a new one for me, and I like it.
We spoke a lot about strategy this morning. You were talking about automation. With regard to labour, without putting words in your mouth, it's somewhat of an elephant in the room, but I think it's an elephant that needs to be addressed.
I was in Taiwan, last fall, and I visited the port of Taipei. Basically, it's completely automated. They went from 44 workers on the port per shift to 22 workers on the port per shift. That would raise flags, you would think. However, they actually doubled their workforce at the port, because they were moving so many goods that they had to get the goods off the port.
It's something that definitely needs to be talked about, because I truly do not believe we're going to lose jobs. As a matter of fact, I met with some folks from the Embassy of Japan on Thursday night of last week. They said, “How do we get access to your ports? We need access to the ports.” I know a lot of the conversation is about getting the goods—our grains and commerce—to the ports, but I think we need to be looking larger and realizing that we are walking past opportunities. As opposed to losing cargo capacity, we should be gaining it.
All of that said, on the strategy you talked about this morning, knowing where we've come from and knowing our shortfalls, if you had to give direction to the government for a new strategy today, what would the top three things in that strategy look like, sir?