International Trade committee  Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for allowing the Canadian National Railway Company, CN, to contribute to the committee and provide information on what has impacted the 2022 supply chains in Canada, as well as some potential next steps that would benefit all partic

International Trade committee  That's a great question. You're accurate on all your numbers. Would Milton help? The answer is yes, absolutely. We have tried to get Milton up and running for the last seven years. It's finally under construction after basically eight years of going through the process of gettin

International Trade committee  None of it was labour-related. It was all space-related. We had full staffing at the terminals. It's just a matter of being able to process all those containers through that terminal at that time and having customers come and pick them up. We thought there was a shortage in truc

International Trade committee  It's whoever is coming to pick up the container. We don't even have the information. When that container comes in from one of the big steamship lines, it gets dropped in our terminal, and that's where our information stops. They contact the end receiver, who would be your constit

International Trade committee  I cannot, because it would be more on the retail side. I don't think anyone's calculated it, to my knowledge.

International Trade committee  Thank you. I always think it's best to let the market take its course. With that, there has to be oversight on how that impacts the overall economy. I'll speak for what I do know, which is that overall on the west coast of the U.S., what they put in place had no impact whatsoev

International Trade committee  I believe you should continue to let the market dictate pricing.

International Trade committee  Just-in-time delivery doesn't allow for any hiccups in the supply chain, so it's a great question. Just-in-time delivery means that everything has to work perfectly or else something backs up, or else there has to be some capacity in the supply chain. I'll say there is a littl

International Trade committee  The railways have very little opportunity to change a long-term pricing model. What we have the ability to do is change anything that happens outside the norm—extra storage and things like that. This is why the storage fees went up: to encourage customers to remove containers fro

International Trade committee  Digitalization is a great answer: You need digitalization to be able to automate. One of the few things that will really help is further automation within the entire supply chain, and that goes from the ports to the railways to the trucking industry. As that happens, you'll get r

International Trade committee  We've been trying to add the inputs. A great example is in Toronto itself. We did have to constrain because the terminal was absolutely full. If we didn't do that, then we'd shut down. We've been trying to get a second terminal up in Toronto at Milton for eight years now. That

International Trade committee  For the port of Montreal, we move out one freight train every day. Basically, it contains Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago freight. I get a daily report that says where we are on container storage waiting to leave in the port of Montreal, so I'll say as of today, in the four termi

International Trade committee  We do not, from the port of Montreal, sir, not at all.

International Trade committee  We do not at all, from the supply chain side. I know they've had lots of labour issues there over time in the different terminals, but they don't, once it's on a rail car or once it's out of the gate on a truck.

International Trade committee  That's a tough one to answer, because it's all about commercial agreements between the big guy and the small guy. We're the guy in the middle who doesn't see either one, so I'd hate to say there's an easy solution there.