Transport committee  Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. My name is Gord Peters. I am the president and co-founder of Cando. For the past five years, I've also had the pleasure of sitting on the RAC board, a position that has given me a great seat to view the great improvemen

Transport committee  There's one comment I'd make. We've run an industrial switching operation in St. Thomas, Ontario, for Formet—Magna International—since 1996. We're handling up to 5,000 car frames a day. We load them and hand them off to either CN or CP. Of course, we were very concerned when we

Transport committee  But they're in it, the contracting system.

Transport committee  Yes. They're in it.

Transport committee  Yes, we would have to go to court if there were a dispute, because we wouldn't know how big the problem was or whatever it was.

Transport committee  If there were a dispute, I don't know how you could put a number on it. It might be $1,000 or it might be $1 million. How are you going to know?

Transport committee  I have just a short comment. I think for some of that, that's where the short lines come into play. I know, for example, at CP, we handle their intermodal yard in Toronto. I'm the one who said that for CN and CP, it's the same thing. For the long and heavy, they do very well, but

Transport committee  Sometimes we run on their lines. We have to go out on their—

Transport committee  CN's or CP's—for a mile or two to help service or to get cars or do whatever, and we've been able to negotiate terms for how we do that. Once again, lots of times industry is paying us—CN and CP are not paying us—to help improve their transportation systems.

Transport committee  I'll just add a real quick one. I came in from Winnipeg yesterday, in a two-hour drive. We don't have an airport, either, so we have to drive for two hours. That's not fair compared to the guys in Winnipeg, but that's life. So I'm captive with no airport, either.

Transport committee  Oh, we have a highway, but in a blizzard and that, and the conditions to do it, how good is that compared to the railroad? We're all captive, to a certain degree, in the rural part of Canada to certain things. These plants are put there because it's economical. The raw material

Transport committee  Part of it is that we are now. The question is whether we're part of it in the future. We're going to have to be, because we could be liable. What's our part in this? We take a train, we break it apart, and we give it to five shippers. CN and CP have admitted that on those type

Transport committee  One of the clear examples of that could be weights, loaded cars. We have all the light-density lines. Some of our lines don't have heavy rail on them. If somebody imposed on us that we had to take the heavy cars, we'd be out of business—just like that.

Transport committee  That's us.

Transport committee  It's more than just the short lines. I mean, we have 14 industrial clients and we work in their plants—potash mines, automotive plants, oil refineries. We have lots of people in a lot of those plants. That's what we're doing today. We're a liaison between the widget builder, the