Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As president and CEO of the Railway Association of Canada, I am pleased to have the opportunity to appear before the standing committee as part of your study on the competitiveness of Canadian agriculture. The RAC represents some 50 operating railways in Canada.

Transport committee  Briefly, regarding the environment, I'll make a couple of points. First, I think the recent harmonization will be very helpful. If there are requirements, at least they won't be duplicating each other between governments. Secondly, the degree to which environmental assessments will inhibit the front-end of the project will very much depend on the corridors.

Transport committee  Obviously the provincial government would have to make a judgment on that, but they certainly should be considered, assuming that their configuration makes some sense in terms of the traffic patterns you're trying to design for. I believe all those kinds of existing right of ways should be looked at in terms of what the configuration looks like and whether you can efficiently use them.

Transport committee  If the volumes are right, the short answer is yes. We have the basic ability to do these things.

Transport committee  The short answer is maybe. You'd have to see what it costs to put that kind of a system in place. Ideally, you would want to develop a business case for creating a North American node. You'd want to leverage not only the Canadian work, but also the work that's going on across North America.

Transport committee  We haven't done so directly. We have a number of associate members who are interested in this, and we work closely with an organization called the Canadian Association of Railway Suppliers. But it is not unusual from an industrial development point of view to think about those sorts of models, particularly if you know that governments are planning to embark on a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar activity that will be as transformative as the kinds of things that have been announced by President Obama and others.

Transport committee  Precisely.

Transport committee  Precisely, and it would be very difficult to put a number on that in this context until you knew the relationship of the operator to the owner of the land. That would to some degree determine the nature of the valuation of the asset. So it's just very difficult to do that at this point in time.

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  We're talking about the types of technology. We're talking about communications technology. We're talking about sensing technology. We're talking about control technologies of various shapes and descriptions. We're talking about a whole range of materials technologies, depending on the nature of the beast you're talking about.

Transport committee  I would have to go back to CN and get precise numbers, but I do know that they're getting better deals than they got when they originally did their estimates.

Transport committee  I can't answer that. They haven't released the 2007 study, which is the most recent. The understanding we have from talking to people involved in that is that at that time the cost looked more like $4 billion to $5 billion all up, but that was frankly at a time when, as you know better than I do, things were pretty heated in the construction sector.

Transport committee  I think in the short term, sir, probably not, but let me give you some good news. I'm sure you know this: CN is putting $100 million into that line as we speak, and I can say that you are going to have a much, much more efficient freight service than you had in the past.

Transport committee  Generally speaking, the price of steel and the price of aggregates are all down substantially, anywhere from 15% to 30%, some of them even more. Labour, of course, as you know, is readily available. So if you were going to embark on a major undertaking of this nature, I would be strongly advising you to try to lock in your contracts as soon as possible.

Transport committee  At the moment, the short answer is no, we have not. We'll certainly take it under advisement. One of our difficulties is that so far the Alberta government has not seen fit to share the study. If we knew what the study said, it would be a very easy thing to give them some advice on what has happened with the construction costs in the short term.