Transport committee  I have a fairly brief answer: no, no, and no. The railways do not compensate the shippers for any additional costs. In our industry, one of the things that's been happening, particularly in the solid wood industry, is that reliability of service is becoming more and more import

Transport committee  I have one other point to add on that. I think that all industries who operate in competitive markets also have to raise capital for the capital investments that they need. To argue that a fairly minimal restraint on monopoly power will have significant impact on your capital in

Transport committee  I think it goes back to the explanation Bob gave earlier today. In urban areas, for example, there is often competition between the two, CN and CP. But for us, our mills are located in rural communities, in communities where only one of the two rail companies is present, either C

Transport committee  There is some history on this, as Bob has mentioned. In the previous bill on this issue, the term “equally to all” had been included. Shippers would be very opposed to the inclusion of the term “equally to all”—that the solution should apply equally to all—for the reason that Wad

Transport committee  Our experience with the existing FOA provisions in the act is that because of the way the FOA provision is designed—which is essentially baseball-style arbitration, where each party puts its best offer forward, and then the arbitrator chooses one or the other—it is actually an ef

Transport committee  Yes, it's acceptable to us.

Transport committee  Yes, I think that would be accurate.

Transport committee  To the extent that freight shipments are being made within Canada for Canadian consumers, the answer to that would be yes. The customers of the railways are not monopolies. The customers of the railways are existing in extremely competitive economic circumstances, and any cost sa

Transport committee  We estimate that it adds 14% to 15% to our total rail bill.

Transport committee  In the legislation as it currently stands, there is one option that works very well for shippers when they have a problem with base freight rates and that is final offer arbitration. Under the current act, that is the only method that has proven effective for us, but it is very c

Transport committee  It is just freight rates.

Transport committee  I think it's difficult to make an exact extrapolation, because what it really depends on is where are your mills, and which railway is servicing your mills, and what amount of competition do you have? So different industries will have a different balance there and a different bal

Transport committee  Yes. These are long-standing issues that shippers have had with the railways. We have a system of having a dual monopoly railway, and until there are ways to either introduce effective competition, or as in the case of this bill, to provide pro-competitive remedies, I think shipp

Transport committee  We have had two problems in recent years. First of all, incidental tariffs have increased randomly. The act as such provides no options for shippers who want to challenge these tariffs, because one shipper cannot bear the costs resulting from final offer arbitration. That would n

Transport committee  I am going to give you an example specific to the forestry industry. We have mills throughout the country, in more than 300 communities in all provinces. We recently conducted a study on rail services and costs incurred by our companies. In the course of that study, we found that