Mr. Speaker, questions about existing service agreements between some shippers, certainly not nearly all of them, but some have over the last number of years been able to negotiate some kinds of confidential contracts with the railways to deal with their level of service. Those contracts are confidential between the railway and the shipper and their content, in terms of how effectively they deal with the service issues between the two parties, is not a matter that is on the public record.
However, the hon. member is correct to say that in those cases where a service agreement, such as it is, exists at the moment, the shipper is not entitled to refer the matter to the CTA unless and until that existing confidential contract expires. This may mean that some shippers might have to wait for some period of time before they would have access to the arbitration process.
We asked a number of questions in the committee about the existence of these pre-existing confidential contracts between some shippers and some railways. We were told that there were not very many of them and they were all pretty well of short duration. That was the testimony before the committee by the parties directly involved. We were given to understand that this was not a large problem.
However, if in fact there turn out to be more of these confidential agreements already existing than we were led to believe there were and if they are of longer duration, five or ten years rather than one or two, then I think there will be a problem with the legislation because a significant number of shippers would then be excluded from the right to have arbitration for some considerable length of time.
However, according to the shippers themselves, when we asked them the question on how many of these agreements existed now and how long they lasted, there were not very many of them and they did not last very long. That was the testimony they gave before the committee.