The Canada Tranportation Act review report was tabled in Parliament yesterday, revealing several recommendations for Canada's rail system, such as more support for short-line railways.

Keystone Agricultural Producers president Dan Mazier says the recommendations were a balance of good and troubling suggestions. In particular, Mazier is concerned with a recommendation to eliminate the Maximum Revenue Entitlement (MRE), which limits the overall revenue of Canada's two major railways.

"That's not very good news because the MRE is working," he says. "It's basically a rate governor, it's not a cap. When the railways haul grain, they get paid, and then they get paid a fair value and that's what that [entitlement] was all about. If [the government] removes that, it will all of sudden eliminate requirement of only being allowed to charge so much."

Mazier says this gets into a bigger issue of competitiveness with what the railways charge.

"In the whole review, it doesn't talk about the need to make sure railway regulations ensure that there's competition," he says, "so when you have a duopoly and when you have these issues like we have where communities are reliant on one railway, that's a monopoly. There's nothing in the review saying that we have to ensure the competition is still alive and has to be mimicked through regulation. There's nothing like that, and that's a problem — especially when they take away the MRE because that was one of the tools to ensure the competition was going to happen."

On the other hand, Mazier was happy to see a recommendation highlighting the relationship between transport and trade. The recommendation states, "the National Transportation Policy declaration in section 5 of the Canada Transportation Act [should] be amended to include more explicit recognition of the importance of transportation to international trade and our ability to compete in global markets."

Mazier says this is exactly the language he wants to start seeing.

"That means someone gets the cost of not being able to transport our product in a timely matter," he says. "That impacts us right through to the end user — he doesn't get his product on time, on spec, on everything — all the way up the food chain right to the producers. The problem is, that costs the producer in the end, but they end up burying the cost of the inefficiencies of the whole system."

However, at the end of the day, Mazier adds this report is only a list of recommendations, but he looks forward to seeing what the government does with it.