Transport committee  Again, it's asking the railroads what their plans are, as is done in the U.S. The Surface Transportation Board asks the class 1 railways to set out their plans for the upcoming year. Again, it's having an idea system-wide—and this goes back to Mr. Masterson's point, too—of all of

Transport committee  No.

Transport committee  It's to make decisions based on timely information, exactly.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  That's an excellent question, though, because it speaks to the need for data. Can we really, at any given time, know what the capacity of the system is? I would say we can't right now, so we need the data and a system-wide dataset to be able to assess where we're at, at any given

Agriculture committee  I would just echo what Ron said, particularly the AgriInvest, AgriInsurance, those seem to be working well, but AgriStability.... To your point about farms being different depending on what you're producing, the size, how diversified you are, we'd like to drill down a little bit

Agriculture committee  I would also add that the use of social media by farmers is quite impressive, and it's very valuable. It's not just to chat, but they often exchange a lot of information—weather, events, whatever—on Twitter. They call it their coffee shop, so that's also a very important form of

Agriculture committee  It would be hard for me to comment on that, given that we're national and our provincial members have views on this question. I would just suggest that as we're again looking at a potential new carbon tax and at requirements over the next five years to increase this levy, farmers

Agriculture committee  I don't have any comment on that.

Agriculture committee  Obviously, there are public-private partnerships as well.

Agriculture committee  As far as I know they are. I think when you talk about Canadians and their mistrust around developing new seed technologies, we forget we have an enormous bank of heritage seeds. We've haven't lost that either. We can still go back to that.

Agriculture committee  Our farms have become extremely efficient, and more and more sustainable, because often better economics leads to better environmental outcomes as well. As we look out, having funding, good research, and innovation programs is going to be critical to getting productivity increase

Agriculture committee  I will definitely agree with what Ron has just said. That's why we'd like to see the AgriStability program have some flexible options in there. That would take into consideration different sizes of farms, different types of farms, maybe even where they're located. If you look at

Agriculture committee  I'm sure we could get that data for you.

Agriculture committee  I would also just like to point out that contrary to popular belief, most farms in Canada are still family-owned. If you look at the tax rules, you'll see it's often more advantageous to sell your farm to an outside interest than to pass it on to a family member because of capita