It's interesting to hear the talk about the rail service review. As industry, we're all waiting to see where it is going to come out at the end of January. We're waiting to see what it comes to. I'm sure you will hear a reply from us at that time.
Good morning. Thank you for your time.
My name is Humphrey Banack. I'm the president of Wild Rose Agricultural Producers, Alberta's largest producer-funded general farm organization. I met with several of you in October to discuss the rail service review process.
At that time, I was in the process of putting $225,000 worth of canola on the ground because rail service was inadequate to meet contracts that were in place. To date, I have moved half this canola, and I hope to move the rest by the end of the year. The inland terminals we deal with are 40% behind in shippings due to poor rail service to date.
That's just a little update. Although this is an important issue, our objective here today is to speak to you about rail freight rates in western Canada.
Thank you in particular for the opportunity to speak to you on behalf of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. With me today is Allen Oberg, chair of the Canadian Wheat Board's board of directors. We are here today on behalf of the CFA, an across-Canada federation of general farm organizations, sector-specific commodity groups, and cooperatives. I am a member of the CFA board of directors and Allen is a member of the CFA national council.
My wife and I farm with my brother and sister-in-law near Round Hill, Alberta, in the central area of Alberta. Transportation is one of the major expenses on our farm, and on all prairie farms, because our grain-growing region is located so far from export positions.
No other grain growers in the world have to move their grain so far to port. My farm is 1,100 kilometres from the port by rail from Prince Rupert and 3,500 kilometres from the St. Lawrence River. American farmers have a much shorter journey to their export position. Farmers in Australia and the Ukraine are only about 300 kilometres away from export water.
There's also something else to keep in mind. In western Canada, we have to move our grain by rail because no other competitive alternative exists. Farmers in Australia, the Ukraine, and much of the U.S. can choose from two or three modes of transportation to reach their tidewater.
As you are aware, a government-appointed panel recently released its interim report on the review of service issues and problems related to the rail-based logistics system in Canada. The CFA is pleased with the panel's extensive review and analysis of the current situation facing railway shippers, including western Canadian grain farmers.
The report portrays an accurate reflection of the problems grain farmers face when shipping their grains to export positions. As pointed out in the report, the biggest challenge farmers face is the market power exerted by railways and the lack of competition therein.
This situation has led to inadequate performance and excessive costs to western Canadian grain farmers. When the Crow rate was replaced by the current revenue cap methodology in 2000, subsequent productivity gains were to be shared with farmers. At that time, the federal government had hoped that competitive pressures and market forces would result in lower transportations costs due to productivity gains. Unfortunately, because of the near monopoly of railways, this has not happened.
The CFA recognizes that the service review panel's mandate explicitly excluded cost or price-related issues, including freight rates, the revenue cap, ancillary charges, and competitive access issues. However, the review panel outlined many problems with railway costs, and for grain farmers in western Canada, this is of paramount importance. Our message is clear: we need the Canadian government to put a rail cost review into motion right away, not a year from now, and not two years from now.
Thanks to devastating rains in the spring, farmers have just harvested an unusually poor-quality crop. Meanwhile, Minister has committed only to “thinking” about the possibility of a cost review after the current rail service review is completed. Somehow, we have to get you, our elected representatives, to understand that these are separate issues involving entirely different groups of analysts and experts, and that every year we wait is another year that goes by with farmers paying millions more than our fair share.
Freight rates need to be based on actual costs, not annual revisions from outdated formulas. We're coming up to 20 full years since the last full review of railway costs. Farming has changed a lot in that time. The railroads are proud of telling anyone who will listen that they're certainly not operating the same way they did then, and freight rates need to be based on today's reality, not the world of 20 years ago.
I'd now like to defer to my colleague Allen Oberg.
As Humphrey said, my name is Allen Oberg. My brother and I run a grain and cattle operation near Forestburg, Alberta. I have been a member of the Canadian Wheat Board's farmer-elected board since 2002 and was elected chairman of that board this past June.
Earlier this year, a broad coalition of farm organizations led by the CFA released an important study confirming what western Canadian grain farmers have known for some years: that we are paying way more than our fair share in rail freight.
This study was commissioned by the Canadian Wheat Board and conducted by a highly respected and highly experienced rail analyst, John Edsforth of Travacon Research. Mr. Edsforth examined rail freights in western Canada for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 crop years. Copies of that study are available for you here today.
I want to comment briefly on Mr. Edsforth's approach. Mr. Edsforth examined rail freights in terms of a particular benchmark. That benchmark is 20% of volume-related variable costs. This is the same benchmark for a fair and reasonable return to railways used by the former Western Grain Transportation Act, or WGTA. It is also the percentage that the Canadian Transportation Agency has determined is the average system contribution for rail movement. A 20% level is also what Travacon Research believes would be the maximum achievable in a competitive environment.
Using this benchmark, Mr. Edsforth concluded that for the two crop years 2007-08 and 2008-09, western Canadian grain farmers paid $123 million and $275 million over and above what would have been considered fair under the WGTA. On a per tonne basis, that works out to $4.61 per tonne too much during 2007-08 and $8.81 per tonne for 2008-09. On an average for those two crop years, we are talking about $6.87 per tonne above what was considered fair and adequate under the WGTA. That is not just on wheat and barley that's marketed through the CWB; it applies to all major grains exported by western Canadian grain farmers.
To illustrate what this means to prairie farmers, let me tell you about my farm. I'm 1,056 kilometres by rail from the Port of Prince Rupert. Over the last two crop years, I shipped an average of 3,660 tonnes of grain. At $4.61 to $8.81 per tonne, that means I paid anywhere from $17,000 to $32,000 more than I would have under the WGTA. And that's just me, that's just my farm, and that's just in one year.
In total, farmers are contributing $200 million over and above what was considered fair under the WGTA, and that's each and every year. Any farmer who wants to know what this study means for his particular farm can use a simple online calculator to figure it out. They simply fill in the tonnes they've delivered, and the calculator comes up with the range of money that could otherwise be staying on their farm. This calculator, by the way, is available through the Canadian Federation of Agriculture website.
How did we get here? Well, there's no great mystery about it. We got to this point because of a huge consolidation of rail infrastructure. More than 1,000 prairie elevators have closed since the 1990s. Today we only have 240 grain elevators across the entire prairie region.
The system needed to become more efficient, and it became so. Today, the railways are shipping more grain in bigger blocks. They were able to pick up more grain with fewer stops along the line, so they are saving money, and that's a good thing. We support the system becoming more efficient and we support the railways making a reasonable profit. But as one of the railways' largest customers, western Canadian grain farmers believe that some of those efficiencies should be passed on to us.
In fact, just the opposite has happened. Over the last 15 years, freight rates have continued to trend higher, and the closure of thousands of elevators means, of course, that we farmers are hauling our grain by truck for much longer distances.
Since 2000, we have had annual revenue caps on Canadian rail company income for grain movement. The revenue cap takes into account things like changes in the volume of grain shipped, changes in fuel costs, and inflation, but it does not factor in the railways' true costs. When railway costs go down because of increased efficiencies, farmers don't share in these gains even when farmers have contributed directly to these efficiencies. As farmers, we're losing millions every single year that we wait for the Canadian government to call for a rail costing review.
Let me repeat. No one is objecting to profitable railways in Canada, but farmers cannot continue to shoulder an unfair share of the load. Freight rates must be fair, both for farmers and for the railways. The question isn't, “Why should we have a costing review?” The question is, “How can we not?”
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
:
Good morning, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning, members of the committee.
Very quickly, I'll note that Pulse Canada is a national organization made up of grower organizations from each of the major pulse-producing provinces and of members of the Canadian Special Crops Association, which are the processors and exporters of peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, canary seed, mustard, buckwheat, and sunflowers.
I think that all of the witnesses you're going to hear are businessmen. We have a business focus: we're trying to increase the profitability of our industry. At Pulse Canada, we're focusing on what every business does, and that's trying to reduce the costs that our industry faces and also to drive up the value, and particularly in pulses, with the tremendous story we have in health, nutrition, and environmental sustainability.
As it relates to costs, the number one issue for our members is transportation. I just want to quote one line out of a World Bank report that really puts our issues into perspective: “Predictability is central to the overall costs that companies incur in logistics and thus to their competitiveness in global supply chains”.
The key word there is “predictability”. What we are facing is a lack of predictability, and this is creating some costs in our industry. For this reason—our focus on trying to address rail costs—Pulse Canada, for the last four years, has had a major focus on transportation. We have played a major role in the Coalition of Rail Shippers and we have spent a lot of time over the last two years on the rail freight service review.
I want to give you just a couple of opening comments and then turn it over to Greg Cherewyk. I want to mention that from a pulse and special crops perspective on the costing of rail service, there are really two areas. There's the visible cost of a rail freight rate, but what we want to bring into this is an important part of the discussion; that is, of the costs shippers are paying, they're paying for service that is unpredictable.
Greg has summarized some of our key findings related to that lack of predictability, how it impacts our costs, and what we believe needs to be addressed to reduce costs and increase the profitability of our sector.
You should all have in front of you right now a copy of a presentation that I am going to refer to. As Gordon said, I am going to talk about some of the factors that have the greatest impact on cost for our industry.
If you look at page 2, you'll see that I've given you a quick summary of what the rail freight service review looked at. I want to draw your attention to the very first bullet, which says “8 Quantitative analysis reports”. What's different about this review and the approach that government took this time around is that we looked at the facts. We went away from town hall meetings, shipper surveys, and questionnaires, and we focused on the evidence. We quantified what service looked like. It is to the credit of Transport Canada that we took that approach.
What were some of the facts? On page 3, I've summarized a key quote there, and that concerns the railways' performance in terms of meeting demand. Both railways together met 100% of the demand only 49% of the time. They met 75% of the demand approximately 57% of the time. If you look at the last sentence on that slide, you'll read that “these average performance levels mask week to week changes in performance that are very significant”.
On page 4, we look at how the railways did in terms of meeting commitments—not meeting the demand, but meeting the commitment that they have made to their customers: “Over the course of the study period, the shippers in the analysis received 90% of planned car supply on the planned day only 12-28% of the time”.
Now let's look how the railways performed in terms of their focus on the customer. On page 5, we note: “High error rates (error rates on bills from 20% to 70%) experienced by customers” on their demurrage bills. These are bills that our members pay for failing to load their cars in 24 hours. In fact, in our industry, many of our members hire part-time or full-time staff just to monitor the accuracy of demurrage bills.
If you look at page 6, you can see a key thing that speaks to the railways' contribution to system efficiencies. One of the most important things you can offer as a logistical service provider is an estimated time of arrival. It helps your customer plan their operations efficiently and effectively, and it helps them work with their supply chain stakeholders to ensure that they're operating efficiently and effectively. Yet “the railways acknowledge that the accuracy of this information is not subject to measurement...and the computer logic...is subject to a high degree of error”.
I'm not going to walk you through all the elements of the study and talk about transit time, variability, and the other findings of the report. I want to jump right ahead to the rail freight service review panel's conclusion: the major cause of rail freight service problems is a lack of effective competition or market power that reduces the railways' accountability for performance, and that has led to less than adequate service.
The last sentence on page 7 says: “It has long been recognized in transportation law that regulations are required to address potential abuse of market power by the railways”. On page 8, the panel says that “there are no practical ways to directly increase rail competition” and that the effectiveness of the current Canada Transportation Act protection provisions did not result in “reasonably adequate” service.
On page 9, we read that the panel “believes that the results of the Phase I research work...would have been much different” if shippers had had “access to effective competition and/or effective regulatory tools”. On page 10, the panel “recognizes that effective legislation and regulation may be necessary to foster an environment that encourages commercial solutions”.
Yet on page 11, instead of following that logical thinking process, they abandon it and suggest that the railways voluntarily implement new process improvements and sign agreements, and that at some point in the future—“2013”—the government should come back and look at this again to see whether we've made the steps towards progress that we all expect. I don't think I need to tell you how the shipping community views recommendations that really say nothing should be done and that someone else should come back and look at this again at some point in the future.
What I do want to spend some time talking to you about is the cost of inaction. On pages 12 and 13, I'm going to refer to a report that Pulse Canada commissioned in late 2009 and received in 2010. It was a report on the cost of unreliable and unpredictable transportation to our industry. We commissioned this report through SJT Solutions, Logistic & Marketing Services, and Mercantile Consulting Venture.
What we looked at was this: what is the cost of unreliable and unpredictable service? There is a real cost—we know that—but we wanted to quantify it. We looked at two ways of approaching this: the qualitative analysis and the quantitative analysis.
The quantitative analysis looked at the impact on our business over the last decade or more. On page 13, you will see a list of changes to the nature of our business as a result of unreliable service. I'm not going to speak to every one of these points, but I will highlight a few.
You've all heard about reduction in container availability and vessel capacity. Put simply, inconsistent and unreliable customers don't get containers or vessel space. The agriculture industry in North America is widely recognized as the least reliable and most inconsistent customer the steamship lines have. It definitely constrains our ability to access containers.
Point number three is on the extension of shipping windows sold. We used to be able to pull the trigger on four-week sales in our industry. That doesn't happen anymore. We don't bid on that business because we can't deliver. That changes our export markets. We routinely use contract extensions, and there are penalties associated with extending your contract. That just means we routinely include contract penalties and cost calculations, which means we put fewer dollars into the pockets of farmers. If we're getting 100% of our demand 49% of the time, we're over-ordering to mitigate risk, which creates inefficiencies across the supply chain.
These are some of the changes to the nature of our business that have occurred over the last decade as a result of unreliable service.
If you turn to pages 14 and 15, I'll talk a little bit about the costs of unreliable service. There are three main areas you look at when you consider costs: incremental costs associated with high levels of inventory, penalties associated with contracts and demurrage, and costs associated with hedging transportation on reliability.
If you look at all of those factors—and on page 15 we do summarize them for lentils alone based on 2008 data—and if you look at total additional storage, administration costs, labour costs, price penalties, demurrage charges, and container detention fees, you'll see that we arrived at an average figure, for lentils alone, of $11.92 as the cost for unreliable service.
If you applied that figure, $11.92, to the forecasted export total for lentils this year, you would arrive at a figure of approximately $14 million in lost earnings. That's on lentil shipments alone as related to unreliable service.
On average, we ship 30 million tonnes of grains, oil seeds, pulses, and special crops every year. I'm not suggesting to you that the figure of $11.92 applies neatly to every one of those commodities, but you should expect that the number will be very large when you look at the cost of unreliable service.
Are freight rates important? Is the price of freight important? Absolutely. But if you turn to page 16, you'll note that we're saying price isn't everything. If price was everything, every farmer in Canada would be driving what they call the Belarus tractor. If price was everything, we'd all be driving Yugos. Both are notoriously cheap. Both are notoriously unreliable. You could purchase a Yugo for under $4,000 U.S. when they were available, and if you had, you would have had what Car Talk voted the worst car of the millennium.
Our members expect value for their freight dollar. That must remain our top priority. The first action the government can take to address profitability at the farm level, profitability at the processing plant, and profitability in the export office is to address service, and to do that by putting forward a regulatory framework that compels all of our supply chain stakeholders to make predictability the central focus of their interactions.
We must first define the level of service that's expected by our business community. Then it would be appropriate to ask whether or not the cost of that level of service is appropriate. This is how, around the world, you establish a brand of consistent and reliable quality and consistent and reliable service. This is how we ensure that our export-dependent ag economy is competitive.
The ask from the pulse and special crops sector is, again, that government look at immediately drafting and passing what the panel included in its interim report as a fallback provision, immediately drafting an act to create the conditions that will result in the commercial solutions we're looking for. We're not so naive as to believe that's going to happen right away. We know that's going to be a long, hard process to put in place, but we have more than enough evidence to take substantive action on this issue.
But we don't have to wait for is performance measurement. That has to begin immediately. There has been a suggestion that this is not something that we need to undertake, but if you don't measure the performance of this system after having undertaken this review, you have no way of knowing whether the improvements you've asked for have resulted in the impact you desire or whether or not those impacts are sustainable.
These are important economic indicators, as important as measuring the performance of your gateways that you've dumped billions of dollars into infrastructure for and that we're happily measuring performance of today. We must measure the performance of the supply chain--the assembly line that feeds product into those gateways--and that we don't have to wait for that. We must begin today.
Thank you very much.
:
Gentlemen, I'll ask one question. Then I have a couple of points and I'd like your comments.
It would seem to me, if my understanding is correct, that right now when the railways don't deliver, the farmer is penalized. Due to unreliable service, you folks lost something like $14 million because of everything that has to happen when that car isn't there. It's my understanding that the railways are not penalized if they don't deliver. Is that correct?
Would an immediate answer to part of the problem, then, be a reciprocal agreement, such that if the railway said it would deliver a car at a certain point in time and didn't, it would be penalized? In effect, one would hope that this would spur them to be more efficient. That's my first question.
I have a couple of communiqués from the National Farmers Union. In May of this year, one said that the major railways collect approximately $1 billion in freight charges from farmers, yet the CTA has announced its approval of a 7% increase in the volume-related composite price index. So they're making this money, they've applied for a 7% increase, and they got it. At the same time, they're not becoming more efficient and you folks are paying out of pocket. I just wanted to comment on that.
The other thing is that it's not only the farmers who are having problems with these folks. I have a letter from the Forest Products Association of Canada. They say that for many years the forest products industry and other commodity shippers have endured poor service and high freight rates while awaiting legislative action to address the lack of competition in Canada's rail freight transportation system.
Then they refer to the panel's interim report, released on October 22, which contains a recommendation that the government delay any legislative or regulatory remedies until after 2013, at which time the government should undertake yet another assessment of the state of rail service in Canada, and after that assessment is complete, only then should any recommendations for regulatory change be considered. I think you alluded to that, Greg or Gordon, in your statement.
I would like some comments on those points, if you wouldn't mind.
:
To your first point on reciprocal penalties, I'll speak for a minute on the view of the Coalition of Rail Shippers. We're a member of that coalition. I'm not representing them today, but I want to tell you about some of the core principles that we put forward to the panel.
One was that there needs to be some form of a standard applied to service. They need to be performing according to a certain standard. If you're going to perform against a standard, you have to be measured against your effectiveness at delivering according to that standard. There's really no point in measuring for measurement's sake. We need to hold each other accountable for actually performing, and that comes through the form of a consequence for non-performance. Finally, we must have an agreed-upon, effective, and inexpensive dispute resolution mechanism.
But the key point was to be held accountable for performing at a level of service, by establishing consequences for non-performance, or what you called a penalty or a reciprocal penalty. This is a core principle that we put forward as a coalition. It's something that we as an industry association built into the concept and the solution that we put forward to the panel--absolutely.
The prop I usually have with me is a CP manual that shows 22 pages of what we call “behaviour modification tools”. There's an action that every shipper must take, and if they don't take it, there's a charge associated with it. We're not asking for a reduction or an elimination of those charges; we're simply saying there has to be balance. If you commit to providing 10 cars on Tuesday the week before that Tuesday and you don't, and you don't provide advance notification, what is the consequence for not performing? And yes, there should be a financial consequence for non-performance.
To your second point, we, as well as the panel, have made the point that under current conditions, in an environment that lacks competition, the railways will ultimately focus on asset control or asset utilization and cost control to the detriment of providing good service. That really is the crux of the issue. We are not going to get anywhere until we address this fundamental problem. The panel concluded that the fundamental problem is lack of competition--it's market power--yet it does nothing to address that fundamental problem.
So yes, the panel must recommend and the government must act on that conclusion. If there is a lack of competition and there is no feasible way of increasing competition in rail freight service, we must address it by putting in place a policy framework that compels them to put service on the same plane as cost control and asset utilization.
On your last point about the Forest Products Association's letter to you and the reference to a review in 2013, that is the second part of the panel's conclusions that we take exception to. The first one was that nothing should be done: that they sure hope everybody gets along over the next little while and that at some point in the future someone else should come back and take a look at this. Also, they put forward a fairly ill-defined framework for a review in 2013, which government should look at to try to measure progress towards the objectives that we all have for improvements.
This process bothers us for a couple of reasons. One is that it's a point-in-time review. Anybody in the business community can understand the failures of a point-in-time review of progress. If Gordon told me he was going to appraise my performance next year and that if I did well according to certain criteria, I would never be subject to a performance appraisal again, I can tell you that my performance would suffer the year after. This is the type of thing we're worried about. There's nothing in place that puts forward some certainty for the business community beyond 2013 if you simply measure its ability to improve performance up to that point.
Second, if you're going to establish a review in 2013, it would seem logical that you put in place the system that will measure performance up to that point, yet they've recommended that the railways themselves monitor and measure their own performance and report on it. So we're putting the responsibility for measuring performance into the hands of those who are subjects of the measurement, which is another problem.
I want to thank all of you for coming out here this morning.
The argument that I think a lot of people are struggling with is that of cost versus service. When you look at it, they are intertwined. There's no question about that. If you buy something from a discount store, you don't expect proper service or extreme service. Thus, when you pay a premium for a product, you expect premium service.
To try to find that balance depends on the product that you're shipping. If you're shipping a low-dollar, high-volume product, you don't really care about service. You just basically want to see it get to where it needs to get to, because you have so much volume going through the system that it doesn't matter.
But if you're dealing in lentils or something like that, service becomes a huge issue, because you have a key customer you're connected with who's expecting that product. I guess that's where I'm going to go with my questioning here.
Humphrey, you talked about this canola you have on the ground. That's costing you a pile of money when it's sitting on the ground, is it not? You're getting a tremendous amount of loss, I would think, by having that canola on the ground.
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But regardless, if that canola does not move, it doesn't matter what the price per bushel is, it's gone. If it heats, if it goes on you, it's gone. If you don't have service, it doesn't help you to go to the bank and tell your banker that it's going to move sooner or later. If it heats in the midterm, it's gone. That's why I look at the service side of things as being very, very important. If you get the service right, it can offset a lot of costs.
Again, Greg, the number you used--about $11 per tonne--is the cost of poor service. When I think about that, if I put that back to my farm, which is roughly 1,000 acres or 1,500 acres, that's roughly--I don't have a calculator--$12,000 or $15,000. If you multiply that across the system, that's huge. Now, if you compare it to what the Wheat Board is saying about $6 a tonne, well, that's a smaller number.
I think when you look at the different products that are in the mix.... On Wheat Board grains, you can look at them and say, well, they're lower-priced products. They're not high-value products like canola, or lentils, or peas. What's more important when we look at the western Canadian industry? Is it to get the lentils, peas, and canola to market? Or the wheat? Because the reality is that wheat has become a byproduct. Farmers are growing wheat basically because of rotation; they're not growing it because it's paying the bills. That's what it's turned into.
So where do you concentrate? Where is the value in our industry as we look forward in the next 10 or 15 years? Is it to get a low-quality-of-service product moved to market or is it to get the high-value goods to market on time and get the premium for being able to deliver them in a proper fashion? That's the question I have.
Mr. Oberg, you talked about having a test--
We have a big country. It's a northern country. We have a small population. With our transportation systems, sometimes it seems as if Air Canada and the rail companies almost have a monopoly.
As Canadians, we sometimes have to give them leeway because of their costs, I guess, but oftentimes, we get less service than our neighbours to the south. They have more competition, as maybe they have the economies of scale, and they get a better price.
What we see in the United States in the rail industry is that there's a lot of investment going into the rail industry there, especially out west. We had Warren Buffett and his investing companies putting a lot of money into rail service in the western United States.
Much of the time, we're trying to protect our ports and we're trying to protect our airports in keeping our east-west links happening. You talked about alternative competition for transportation in the Ukraine, the States, and Australia, which have their water very close.... It's not going to happen here. We have to use rail, which is a given for the foreseeable future.
Are there ways that we as government could encourage going through the U.S. more, for instance, and using their ports if our canola is going to Asia or our wheat is going to the Arab countries? Maybe that would result in more competition. Maybe that would smarten up our rail people. I don't know. I know it doesn't sound very Canadian, but at the end of the day, we have to compete with these other suppliers of grains. If we don't have the best transportation system available....
Are you people open to that? Is it possible to have more north-south shipping so that you would ship your grain through United States ports to get to your markets?
:
Earlier, Marc talked about competition. There is no better remedy to discipline companies on costs than more competition.
However, it is clearly not easy for shippers, for example, to do business with U.S. railways, or to choose another mode of transportation that may well cost more. So that's a solution, but other railways cannot be pulled out of a hat. That is not easy.
As soon as the railways discovered that we would be discussing railway services, they wasted no time sending us a letter. I imagine that colleagues on the committee received the same letter I did. They told me that the sector is fully competitive. I'd like to share some of the points raised by the Railway Association of Canada to convince us that in the end, we don't need a cost review. I am somewhat suspicious when private companies tell me they do not want a cost review. Furthermore, we will not necessarily conclude that costs are too high as a result of the review. Companies don't know that yet. Or perhaps they already know the answer, and that is why they don't want the review to take place. I find it odd that people are opposing a cost review.
The Railway Association of Canada says that the Canadian market for rail rates is very competitive. It is referring, of course, to Canadian railways, but the association is also talking about U.S. railways. Have you had much opportunity to use U.S. railways?
They have also talked about trucking. Can shippers ship by road as easily as by rail?
They have talked about pipelines, but I assume that it must be rather difficult for grain producers to use these pipelines.
They talked about maritime transportation via the Great Lakes. I imagine that in western Canada, that doesn't really help you very much.
I would like to hear your views on how competitive the sector is. My question is for all of you.
Mr. Bacon.
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Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
This is an excellent discussion and certainly you're raising an excellent point, particularly with respect to service. I mean, even if there were no costs...if there were no service and no costs, it wouldn't make sense either. So definitely, the level of service and the costs are related.
I do agree with some of the comments that the service has to be guaranteed, has to be improved, and has to be more reliable, and then the costs figured out from that. There has to be a basic expectation that service will be delivered to our western farmers.
Now, there are two questions I want to ask. The first is on service.
I want to know, particularly from Greg, what specific recommendations you have about service and guaranteeing service. It's easy to say that we should have service legislation or a service model, but practically, I'd like to know what you think about that. Let's say the rail company says they're going to have 100 cars there, and they don't. Do you see that as, okay, we're just going to penalize them financially and therefore the farmer gets a better deal on his transportation rates? Or do you have something else to suggest to alleviate that problem with service? I'd like to know what your thoughts are on this solution-wise.
:
I've said that I've supported the fallback provisions of the panel, and their fallback provisions include our recommendation, so I'll speak to both of them at the same time.
The panel recommended in its fallback provisions that the railways provide advance notification of service changes. That was the first recommendation: that they would provide advance notification of changes to service that are affecting anybody, any of their stakeholders. The second was to enter service agreements with their customers. This was the recommendation we put forward.
Now, just to build on that and to give you some idea of what we're recommending, a service agreement is basically an agreement that defines the roles and responsibilities of both parties. It's a balanced agreement that says “these are the standards we both agree to adhere to”. It says how they agree to measure their performance--their service effectiveness--against those standards; what their agreed-upon terms are and what the terms are of the consequences for non-performance; what they agree to do in order to communicate with each other to manage problems; and what is their agreed-upon dispute resolution mechanism.
It's a service level agreement. Government has service level agreements. Microsoft has service level agreements. International and multinational logistics companies have them. They define the responsibilities of both parties. It's a contract, in effect, but it deals with service. This is what we're talking about.
In our case, for the pulse industry's service level agreement, we're not saying that you must meet 100% of my demand 100% of the time. What we're saying is this: you understand the constraints on your pipeline, you understand the seasonality of flows of coal and lumber, and you understand what's causing congestion at Vancouver at any given point in time.
We're saying, “I'm ordering 25 cars for next Thursday and you tell me what you can deliver”. Based on that commitment, we will measure your performance. So the Friday before, when you issue your final service plan and it says that you will get 20 cars on Thursday, we'll hold you accountable for 20 cars--and on Thursday. That's the first measure we'll look at. Of course, there are still 22 pages of things that hold the shipper accountable for doing all kinds of good things that make the railways efficient.
We're saying that they will provide a commitment and we'll measure their performance against it. Second, if they're going to change that plan, and we know that it'll change, we are telling them what the standard is for informing us of that change and, again, what the consequences are for not informing us. Then, once we load and release the cars, we're telling them to provide us with an estimated time of arrival. This notion that we're not going to measure the effectiveness of our ETAs and that the computer logic will be faulty is unacceptable: improve the estimated times of arrival so that our members can plan and operate efficiently and their supply-chain stakeholders can also plan and operate efficiently. These are the types of things--
I just have one question. If I have any time remaining, I'm going to let Mr. Shipley ask a question or two as well.
Obviously there are a lot of challenges that farmers face, particularly new farmers who are trying to get into the industry now. If you really want to boil down the main challenge that farmers face nowadays—and I think we have all heard this, because I know I've heard it many times from farmers—it's simply a matter that the costs to do business have increased at rates that are a lot higher over the last, say, 30 or 40 years, than the prices that the farmers have been getting for their product. I guess that's what it really boils down to. When the cost goes up and the price doesn't, it obviously becomes harder and harder to do business.
We're talking about one of those issues here today. Rail costs are certainly one of the issues that farmers face, but I guess what I want to do is ask you to compare it to other issues. Certainly when we look at something like fertilizer costs, it's much the same kind of thing: you have a limited number of places where some of the inputs into fertilizer come from. Similarly with railways, when there's a lack of competition, costs can be driven up, and it's an issue that farmers have to deal with.
We can look at all kinds of issues. Costs for machinery and equipment and the cost of fuel, whatever it might be, have all increased at higher rates. Then, of course, when we're talking about our grain farmers in western Canada, particularly wheat and barley farmers, there is the fact that we have the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, which also contributes being unable to get a higher price for the products when there are less customers available to them than there might be if they had the opportunity to choose freely. These are all things that I guess we'll call irritants, things that cause issues, whether it be the cost side or the price side that can affect a farmer's bottom line.
I think we all recognize that there's an issue here. We all recognize that there's an issue, whether it be service or costing. I want to get a sense from you where you feel that ranks, for lack of a better way of putting it, in terms of comparing it to some of the other issues, like fertilizer or the lack of competition, when we're talking about wheat and barley. Where does it sit in terms of a ranking, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it, compared to some of the other issues you face?