Transport committee  That's right. With the way the agency treats the calculation under the legislation today, removing that interswitching as other income that doesn't count against their maximum revenue that they can earn is a recommendation that has some merit worth looking at. That won't penalize the producers who are requiring or wanting to have the interswitching.

Transport committee  I was also responsible to Mr. Emerson for potash and a number of other commodities. Other commodities force your products.... Potash, the rest of them...they're dealing in a market-based system. In a way, they feel they're subsidizing the grain shipping. From that perspective, there is a distortion from that.

Transport committee  [Inaudible—Editor] tonnes of additional capacity to use intermodal containers. Also the hopper car fleet is aging dramatically. To replace the hopper car fleet with high cube cars, we can create five million to eight million tonnes of additional capacity just on the existing rail system by utilizing the current corridors.

Transport committee  Just remember, even sunsetting doesn't take it out of the hands of the agency. The agency still has the right to set the interswitching distances. Sunsetting doesn't mean you're getting rid of interswitching provisions at all. That being said, 160 kilometres, 30 kilometres, which is more the norm in the act implementation previously, really, again, we want to make it very clear that it's an arbitrary number.

Transport committee  In the current regime, it would be by rail today, yes, but that is changing, and containers are becoming much more prevalent.

Transport committee  Yes, sure, I will. On interswitching, I think a very important consideration is that during the deliberations, we had a very limited ability to poll examples of actual utilization of the interswitching provisions that were extended out to 160 kilometres. That said, when we do look at it in a kind of post-report reflection, we see that shippers don't agree that the infrequent use of that provision makes the feature of their regulatory regime have limited effectiveness or impact.

Transport committee  The key foundational elements of the recommendation related to roles and responsibilities of a commercial system are adequate information and powers of the agency to be able to investigate and act on its accord to examine systemic issues within the transportation system. Today the CTA is entirely reactive to a complaint.

Transport committee  Which question?

Transport committee  Good morning. Thank you very much for having me.