Agriculture committee  Good afternoon, everyone. I'm only going to spend a brief part of my time discussing the circumstances that put us in this position. I believe it's more useful to focus on what we have done and are doing to recover and ensure that our service is back at the levels that you and

Agriculture committee  I can explain that for CN, it wasn't just weather; it was an unprecedented volume increase. We had a view of a much lower volume increase coming into the system, roughly 3%. It ended up growing to be 11% in a variety of commodities. On top of that, the weather was more severe for

Agriculture committee  Do you want me to go first, James?

Agriculture committee  We have been investing in mid-train remote distributive locomotives for the last many years, as have my friends at CP. The ability to place that air compressor in the middle of a train allows you to continue to run the same length you run all year round. On top of that, what we'

Agriculture committee  We're not doing it well enough, but yes, absolutely.

Agriculture committee  Yes. We fully understand that three to four months a year we have to deal with this issue, and we will not be sitting back at any given time and not taking the necessary action—and not just necessary action, but trying to innovate and trying to use whatever technological means we

Agriculture committee  We're exactly the same, in that 90% of our grain business is contracted. To James's point, reciprocal penalties are in place. The idea is to make the best use of the capacity in the fleet. The one thing that we continue to learn is how to understand our capacity and resiliency b

Agriculture committee  We're not a lot different. We had six quarters of either flat or decreasing volume demand. I can't really give you information on retention; however, our focus is to be ahead of that curve and to not get caught as short as we have been.

Agriculture committee  I'll speak on our behalf. We have made considerable strides in the last three weeks since the bottoming out in February. As James mentioned earlier, everything we're doing right now—having retired employees come back, delaying vacations, hiring, leasing locomotives—is to clear th

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. We're just disappointed that we're not meeting the expectations of not just the supply chain but of our customers specifically. As James mentioned, we had a pretty tough run from late October in the fall. Again, we had unprecedented volumes that were moving, but then

Agriculture committee  We did. We acted on it before October, and it's not just the train crew, but locomotives as well. Then on top of that, the lead time for track capacity can be upwards of 12 to 18 months. We did everything possible we could to inject the resources, actually starting back in the la

Agriculture committee  I'll say it one more time. We apologize, seriously, for not meeting the expectations of all the supply chains we're in, and we take it extremely seriously. The capital investment that we're making, which we'll continue to make, and our belief that we need to have integrated infor

Agriculture committee  This isn't just about grain; this is intermodal. As James mentioned earlier, this is the energy market. Every one of these markets hits records for us. This is more than just one commodity. We run a network. Whether it's shared assets of tracks or shared assets of locomotives o

Agriculture committee  It's the same thing; we operate in the same areas in Vancouver. When I talk about the sharing of information, it's that integrated view of what the future holds for the commodity. We need that. We're very capital-intensive. It's not that we aren't going to invest, but we want t

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's correct.