Agriculture committee  We have about 6,000 government hopper cars out of a fleet of 18,000, so there's your surge capacity of 6,000.

Agriculture committee  If I may, we're meeting the minister again on February 24. He's asked for some additional information in terms of the ability of the supply chain to move grain through individual corridors, and the like. That's something we're looking at right now. We have been meeting the minist

Agriculture committee  To put that number in perspective, we have a fleet of 50,000 railcars, so you're talking about 2,700 on 50,000, and they are an assortment. Some are 50 years old.

Agriculture committee  In terms of the Fair Rail Freight Service Act, I think there are a couple of very important elements of that bill that were recognized in its drafting. One is that service shouldn't be imposed to the benefit of one shipper to the detriment of another. The arbitrator has to consi

Agriculture committee  The bulk trains are generally shorter than some of our intermodal trains, so it would depend. It's just having a cascading effect right across the entire network—not only our network but also other railroad networks as well. The same weather is in the Dakotas and right in the gra

Agriculture committee  That would be affected. That would be less than 7,000 feet. But the other very significant impact from these extreme temperatures is velocity reduction, so everything takes a lot longer.

Agriculture committee  The efficiency of the system—and we have an incredibly efficient system—is designed around velocity. The gentleman from Thunder Bay was right. Thunder Bay is a great location for CP because we have a seven- or eight-day cycle time. So we're spinning cars through Thunder Bay in se

Agriculture committee  It's quite significant. We run less than 7,000 feet on CP once the winter operating condition kicks in on that subdivision. We're running some trains up to 14,000 feet, so if you do the math, it's quite significant. I can't throw out all the numbers, but it really affects our abi

Agriculture committee  Yes, but that would be the longest train—the longest to the shortest.

Agriculture committee  Right. We're using a September compare. We dropped August because we didn't have grain to move in August. So to make a fair comparison, we're using September to the end of January. At CP we're 8% over last year, which was a record.

Agriculture committee  That's an industry number, so it obviously includes other railways beyond CP. I would think they have August included, because last crop year August was a fairly robust month for movement. Because we didn't any grain to move, we dropped August out of that compare.

Transport committee  Our CDR really overlays the existing robust regulatory regime, so you can CDR as opposed to going to the agency if you feel we're not meeting our level of service obligations and the like. We find that embedding a CDR into a piece of legislation is an oxymoron, really. A CDR is a

Transport committee  We have 2,500 agreements at CP right now with commercial dispute resolution embedded in them. So all our new agreements have commercial dispute resolution.

Transport committee  The border would be very important. A lot of our traffic is interchange traffic with class 1 railways in the U.S., for example. There is the state of manufacturing plants, labour shortages.... There is a long list.

Transport committee  Knock on wood—and right now it's very pertinent with what's going on in the U.S.—but we do a pretty good job at the border. We have full electronic data interchange. We installed VACIS machines right across our networks at both CN and CP. So everything that goes into the U.S. is