Transport committee  Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee today. I should start by commending the members for their non-partisan approach to this bill, as well as for their fortitude, doing this all week long, and the hours that you're maintaining. I'm here in my capacity as

Transport committee  Let me answer you by posing a question to you, which is, why aren't the remedies used? I know some of you have asked that question. If you approach it from that perspective, you can see what's going to happen to industry over time. If we look at the Canada Transportation Act as

Transport committee  Many of the remedies we have in the act today actually came as a result of possibly a maverick, Don Mazankowski, back in the eighties. The advent of the National Transportation Act of 1987 introduced final offer arbitration and the competitive line rate mechanism. It changed the

Transport committee  Yes. I've written in this area probably the least read articles in Canada on this subject. There are many types of running rights regimes. It's a good scaremongering tactic by the carriers. I've heard on numerous occasions about how it would devastate the economy. As the Teck w

Transport committee  I think right now the railways have obtained the ability to discontinue rail lines on a basis that I think is reasonable for the rationalization of their networks. I've always been a little bit concerned about how easy it is for them to go through that process, but that is the pr

Transport committee  Okay, well, that's ridiculous.

Transport committee  For a slightly more nuanced answer, think about it like this. I heard one comment that if they have access to trucking for 25% of their production, that party is no longer captive. Well, there is the other 75% that's still captive, and that's the thing we're looking for. Let's

Transport committee  I could do an example like this for virtually every shipment in Canada. Anybody who would want to use trucks to move coal would similarly have lost their mind. I did this calculation once, put 25 million tonnes on the road, and you're talking about one truck every two and a half

Transport committee  My view is that we already have some precedents to help us address how quickly a review should occur. I'll give you the answer first. I think it should be two years, but I would live with four. Here's the reason. The SLA mechanism was introduced through Bill C-52 in 2013. Last

Transport committee  That's a very good question. If I had it my way, we would do it differently from the way I'm articulating. I'd be asking a lot of you. Ideally what would happen is that shippers would have an opportunity to get a sense of the railway's costs before they went into the final offe

Transport committee  If you made the data that's found in clause 76 available to you and you had in Canada a data disclosure system like the URCS that I described, then you could do it, but not with these amendments. It would take quite a bit more.

Transport committee  Nonsense. Let me just get on that one, because I hear that a lot too. They do this in the States. The URCS requires this data disclosure right now. CN and CP have to disclose that data in the United States; there's no reason that it can't be disclosed in Canada. Further, this

Transport committee  No, that isn't the case. I know that it's a very tempting thing to say, but I can tell you that U.S. shippers are frustrated by what they have. What they have is more than what we have on this front, but what we should do because of our modern data ability—data gathering and data

Transport committee  First of all, it does look like the former point, so I'll concede that, but it's really on the latter point that I'm trying to focus my comments. If an agency decides, for example, that this x level of service is required in these circumstances in order to meet the adequate and

Transport committee  I accept all of those comments, but I would do one thing on reciprocal penalties for sure. I would allow the agency a lot more latitude in the setting of those reciprocal penalties than they currently have. Right now, when you invoke a process, the agency has the ability to award