Finance committee  One of the things that Saskatchewan especially has seen in the communities is the loss of hospitals and schools. When the railway leaves, the town dies. As Allison mentioned, we look at short-lines as good for the environment. We're good for the highway network, and really, if

Finance committee  What we need to do.... As Allison mentioned, when we took over these short-lines they were in disrepair. Now we need to come up with a program to give our shippers confidence that we'll be there forever. This one-time shot will bring our lines back up to acceptable condition, whe

Finance committee  The interesting part of that is the fact—Allison mentioned crossings—that we were successful in a couple of them, but the funding was only half. To put signals or that type of thing at a crossing costs about $250,000. We'd have to come up with $125,000. We don't have enough pop b

Transport committee  A point that we didn't make today was the fact that the short-lines don't have some of the opportunities available to shippers through the CTA. I've got to convince one of our shippers to take on that issue, and they're not always very happy to do that on our behalf. So that migh

Transport committee  I think what we need to do is go back and look at—

Transport committee  There were some issues. We were also here discussing that a couple of times. It wasn't perfect. The point we're trying to make in our visit here is that this does nothing for us. We have come here to Ottawa several times saying that we need some help. We're in very tough shape.

Transport committee  Thank you, sir.

Transport committee  We walk a bit of a fine line because there are some positive things in it for our customers away from the short-line. It was mentioned earlier that there's some concern even this year because the bill is not passed, and we're kind of sitting out there in the open. We want to be

Transport committee  Really, the theme of today from the get-go has been competition. For at least 12 of the 14 short-lines, this reduces that competition. In essence, it makes it more difficult for our customers to compete, and that makes it hard for the short-line. As I mentioned several times, ou

Transport committee  No. As this bill as written right now, if you look at it from the straight, short-line perspective, there's nothing in it that helps.

Transport committee  It's probably about 98%. I'm embarrassed to say that out loud. The thing about our short lines is that our shareholders are the municipalities and the farmers we represent. That money is put right back into it. We don't worry too much about share price and profit margin. We worr

Transport committee  In some cases we've seen where maybe initially the short line bought into places. The oil boom caused a lot of people to change their minds. I think the class 1s had a couple of railways they wish they had hung on to. There are a couple in Saskatchewan that I think they would wan

Transport committee  One thing about it is that, if they took them back, they'd have more capital to put into them, but then the customer on that line would have to deal with, let's say, service.

Transport committee  Part of it was, I guess, because we try to keep our customers competitive. We really do what our costs are. The interesting part of that was that some of these rates that we're charging were originally set by our class 1 partners as our division, so that's all we ever got. Our

Transport committee  I knew you were going to do that.