Transport committee  The simple reason why that isn't the case is because shippers can't take the railways to court. They are dependent on the railway. You cannot sue them, because their remedy is not to service you. That whole idea is patently absurd. It arises very infrequently that a shipper will

Transport committee  This is a point that endured some debate before Transport. I think this is a legitimate point of contention between the parties: how wide should those gates be opened. Most contracts, as has been mentioned already, are of short duration, so eventually that's going to come up. T

Transport committee  The lawyer part.

Transport committee  I'm actually an antitrust economic lawyer. In this domain, what you're looking for is to allow the optimal result to occur. What we're trying to achieve here is sufficient balance between the parties. It's never going to be perfectly balanced in that you're always going to have

Transport committee  I will answer in English. I have a couple of points. One is a point that I think has already been raised, which is that to look at the very short term is not helpful to the exercise before us today. This is a bill that is going to stay in the act for a long time, so we need to b

Transport committee  That's right.

Transport committee  Okay. Surprisingly, no, shippers have not agreed to the railways' proposed mechanism. Frankly, though, here's a place where there is some agreement—namely, that a standard form, as Monsieur Mongeau said, may not be the best thing for every single situation. The devil is in the d

Transport committee  As the minister said when he introduced his comments before this committee, this is not a normally functioning market. There are many, many parts of this market that do not work, so to suggest that normal commercial relations are going to prevail in the absence of a framework is,

Transport committee  Yes, it's in the tariff-making power that Parliament granted railways. That is unilateral and it's done legally. It's a penalty for failure to do something.

Transport committee  No, it's not arbitrated; it's unilateral. It's even worse.

Transport committee  As I said, I'm in that business. Right now the railways have, and have had for decades, the unilateral ability to impose rates and conditions of service. Parliament decided at some point to allow railways to impose penalties on shippers—had no concerns with that whatsoever. That

Transport committee  No. What I'm saying is that the ability of a party to respond to that unilateral statutory authority necessitates a system that allows the shipper to invoke it. That's what we have in the final offer arbitration mechanism. That's what this system proposes. That's what the governm

Transport committee  That's correct.

Transport committee  On the first question, which I took to mean the six issues raised in the final report of the service review panel, those are the provisions that we were surprised not to see in the bill. They were very clear, stark recommendations. Again, I'm not even sure the railways disagree

Transport committee  Right. I foresee no shortage of business coming my way as a result of any purported change in service levels. Anything that's looked at episodically like that, such as talking about what's happened in the last two months, to me is not really an indication of what the larger prob