Transport committee  Of course, not all disputes are resolved by mediation. I wish that were the case, but clearly some remain. Many disputes are resolved by mediation or outside the recourse provided by law. These provisions are there, of course, because others are not resolved. At the moment, ther

Transport committee  No, that's specific for grain-dependent branch lines. There's no provision.

Transport committee  On the group FOA, the minister referred to it as a class action. When you go into every province, a class action has a two-step process. First of all, you have a certification of a class; you say they are a group that has the same issue and they can go as a group to the court. We

Transport committee  The process for line discontinuance and transfer was established in 1996, and it basically is a time-geared process where if a railway has identified lines that it thinks it wants to get rid of, it identifies those lines in a plan, it publishes the plan, and that line has to be i

Transport committee  For sure, we're there. We're in St. John's and we're in Halifax, and we have capacity there. Capacity is not an issue on the east coast. What we want is more business,and we are working with the ports. We are working with shippers internationally through our CN WorldWide. We have

Transport committee  We wanted compulsory mediation. We wanted to force the parties into a room to talk about the issues, clarify what the issues are, understand, because sometimes with the FOA, after you've put your offer on the table, that's it, you can't change it and you're stuck with that. And i

Transport committee  Ancillary charges are not for the movement of freight, they are costs that, in many cases, the shipper need not pay but often decides to anyway. Take freight cars, for example. A shipper has 24 or 48 hours to unload a car at no charge. If he takes a week to do it because he has d

Transport committee  No one wants to pay for parking if there is a way to avoid it.

Transport committee  We're in the same position, but that is why we favour mediation. Mediation is a non-confrontational approach, and we have been involved in a number of mediations. I'm very happy to say that in all those in which I've been personally involved, we've resolved the issues. In mediati

Transport committee  I had essentially finished. Thank you very much.

Transport committee  Well, I guess any incident on the railway becomes first-page coverage, and--

Transport committee  Yes, that's true. But the minister asked for the Railway Safety Act to be reviewed, and there was a committee established. We participated extensively in that committee. I think--

Transport committee  I don't think the committee has reported yet.

Transport committee  I understand now which issue you're referring to. Basically, CN did not ask them not to publish the results. We said that if they published the results, we wanted them to also publish CN's answer to those results. That was the only request we made to the minister.

Transport committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. CN certainly appreciates the opportunity to appear before you today on Bill C-8. I'd just like to address something that Minister Cannon raised when he was here, and Mr. Mackay alluded to, and that's the commercial dispute resolution process. A