Mr. Speaker, I am sure the member for Ottawa Centre agrees that government regulations should be a last resort. That is why we gave the two parties, the shippers and the rail lines, a period of time to try to work this out in a private commercial agreement.
Unfortunately, they were not able to do that.
Based upon that, we knew it had to be done. We have had many talks with the stakeholders. We listened to all sides of the story and looked at the challenges they have and tried to put a bill together based upon the input from the stakeholders on both sides. We think Bill C-52 contains the substance we need, including the period of time from when the complaint is first brought, the time allowed to resolve it and, if not resolved, a brief arbitration period, which can be extended for a short time. At that time, if the railways, for whatever reason, fail to rectify the situation they are subject to fines of $100,000 per day per complaint. If one single shipper has five complaints about bad rail cars, that would be $500,000 a day. If we multiply that by the number of forest outfits across the country, it could be significant.