Agriculture committee  Interswitching adds into the system the ability for captive shippers to have access to another railway. There are designated interchange points at which the first railway would bring the goods to the interchange point at a regulated rate—now that's out to 160 kilometres—and hand it off to the other railway with which the shipper has contracted.

Agriculture committee  Those are commercial arrangements. There are no penalties in the legislation that apply to either party. Those are commercial relationships between railways and shippers. Under Bill C-30, the Fair Rail for Grain Farmer's Act—that's the one I missed when I said there were four provisions—the compensation provision that was added allows for shippers to claim out-of-pocket expenses in the instance of a railway service failure.

Agriculture committee  Is it about increased capacity with respect to the ability to transport grain?

Agriculture committee  As Shawn mentioned in his earlier comments, there have been initiatives put in place to expedite the transportation of grain by the railways. I guess I would say that the indications we have—and we monitor each grain week to see where we are in terms of performance both of transportation and at the ports—are that performance has been very good this winter.

Agriculture committee  That's correct.

Agriculture committee  The department doesn't have or collect statistics on this. These are commercial arrangements between railways and shippers. We have some anecdotal evidence that we've heard from shippers about their usage, and some indication from the transportation agency about the usage of interswitching.

Agriculture committee  Do you mean related to the extension of the interswitching provisions?

Agriculture committee  I'm not familiar with that.

Agriculture committee  Yes. Just for the record, the other provision of the four is the compensation provision that's provided for in the legislation, as one of the four elements that are part of the sunsetting provisions.

Agriculture committee  That's right. They're collective: they all expire or they all are extended.

Agriculture committee  All of the provisions in Bill C-30 collectively will expire. The defining operational terms, the interswitching, the grain volume requirements and...I'm missing one of them. The permanent ones are the Canada Grains Act amendments that relate to contracts, and the data requirements under the regulations, which are continuing.

Transport committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to respond to the question that was asked earlier about whom we communicated with at Marsh Canada, the name was Evan Garner.

Transport committee  Garner.

Transport committee  There are regulations that provide for scoping in other dangerous goods. A decision would have to be made by the government to move forward with that.

Transport committee  That's right.