Agriculture committee  For sure, there has to be some level of enforcement. The difficulty will be to make it timely and accessible so that it doesn't take six months or a year and a great deal of cost to try to get to the point at which there's a resolution.

Agriculture committee  I would, in principle. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at there.

Agriculture committee  I think level-of-service agreements are really what we're after.

Agriculture committee  Generally, I'm not sure it matters whether it's a government-owned car or a railway-owned car. You do hear complaints about those not being in good repair. I don't have any statistics or anything quantitative to really put an edge on that at all.

Agriculture committee  The grain research laboratory is a real gem that the Canadian Grain Commission has. It does a lot of great work and puts quality parameters around each year's crop. For instance, if that were moved from the Canadian Grain Commission to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and considered a research mandate and funded as research, that would take that cost out of the system.

Agriculture committee  I guess it will be interesting to see how it rolls out and whether each individual shipper has to do their own negotiation, or whether groups of shippers or a whole industry will be able to use some sort of template agreement to come to some resolution when dealing with the railways, that these are our obligations, and these are their obligations, and how this will be monitored and what the system will be in place if one or the other side believes that their partner is not living up to their agreement.

Agriculture committee  Correct. That's the problem. The railways basically walked away from the table in the Dinning process, saying that they were not going to play this game, that they were not going to voluntarily enter into agreements with shippers. That's why the hammer was legislation saying that they will have to sit down and come to a commercial arrangement.

Agriculture committee  It's my understanding from the news I've seen that the government is ready to introduce its rail service legislation, and that we will get a first chance to see it by the middle of this month. You're in Ottawa, and I am not. I'm sure you have much better information than I do.

Agriculture committee  Certainly. The system has worked reasonably well this fall, but this fall has been a little different. We had a very good harvest season, so we have a fairly narrow grade. We don't have this wide proliferation of grades and a bunch of grain that's damp. That helps the system. We didn't grow a monster crop either.

Agriculture committee  Yes, and the best examples would be some livestock pelleting plants, and some specialty crop processing and cleaning operations. The ethanol plant, especially the one at North West Terminal Ltd. at Unity, does very well. It's not a large ethanol plant, but it provides ethanol and there's an incentive for smaller plants.

Agriculture committee  I don't expect a great increase in malting production with barley or a great increase in flour milling. I think many of the processors would prefer to deal in an open market and that might slightly lever in favour of more operations. However, I don't think the Canadian Wheat Board was as large an impediment to value-added as some people believe.

Agriculture committee  Thanks very much for the opportunity. First, I will provide a little background on ITAC, the Inland Terminal Association of Canada. There was a time when the grain handling system of western Canada was dominated by farmer-owned cooperatives. Those days are long past but there are a number of farmer-owned grain facilities and most of them are under the banner of ITAC.