All right. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. My name is David Vernon. I'm the Transportation and Airline Analyst at Bernstein. I would like to first and foremost welcome you all to day 3 of Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decision Conference. I would also like to thank you all for showing up in the morning of day 3 and making me look good in front of Canadian National, who's been good enough to join us here for the conference. Tracy Robinson, the CEO, and Ghislain Houle the CFO, from IR, is also here. You guys know the drill by now. I'm not gonna tell you what Pigeonhole is or isn't. If you have questions, stick them into the app that you should be able to get through a QR code. They'll filter up here, I can work them into the conversation. With that, I'm gonna kick us off, and first of all, say welcome. Thank you for supporting the conference. And maybe you could give us a little bit of a top-down overview of how you see the state of the economy and the state of your business. Yeah, let me maybe I'll start. So firstly, thank you for this. You know, it may only be 9:00 A.M., but we're halfway through what a day is in railroading by now. Trains have been running for hours and all night. But it's great to be here in New York. We were just talking about whether we could swing a weekend out of this. I don't know if we're gonna get a chance to this time, but what a fabulous place. Thank you. And I'll maybe just start with a couple of comments for context as we go forward. We introduced, as you know, a new operating model just over two years ago, and a schedule operating and planning. It's not complicated. That's the whole point of it. It's not complicated. We have a network operations team that designs it. They look at all of the volume across the railroad, and they build a plan that moves it all, that optimizes the whole. So it's not, you know, the long train strategy, it's not optimizing for an individual terminal. It optimizes the whole. And then the field operations team runs that plan. So this is our make the plan, run the plan, sell the plan, model. And we've been doing that for just over two years now, and it's working very well. We are faster. We are more efficient. Our dwell time over two years has gone down by more than 10%. Our velocity is up by 25%. Our on-time departure and arrival performance is up 47%, 53%, I think, respectively. And so this is working, and most importantly of all, our customer service levels are very strong. We-- they're consistent, and we've seen a dramatic change in that, give us pricing power. So we've been able, over that 2 years to drive, you know, EPS growth, as it drive to the bottom line, growth in EPS of 23%. So I'm happy with the way the railroad is running. This is working. This is the right model for us. We're not done yet. We're still tweaking. We're still making it better, but we've got significant traction, on the ground every day running this model. And as we turn our attention to growth, once we had that kind of running, we looked forward and, did an assessment on how much growth we could see looking out over the next 5, 7, 10 years. That led us to an investor day, I guess, about a year, what, a year and a half ago? Yeah, last night. We looked at a growth plan, and the big question was: How much growth is there in rail and real rail growth? And we came up with a plan that we laid out in front of you all. It's gonna drive 10%-15% EPS growth on average over the next three years. But it was driven on two things. One was, as railroads do, we will grow with the economy, and the scheduled operating plan is a consistent kind of operation that allows us to really understand our capacity and allows us to respond to what's going on in the economy effectively. Whether it is a positive growth, which we're seeing some of now, or whether it's some of the shocks to the system, like the fires and the port strike we had last year, this operating model allows us to recover very, very quickly. So about half of our growth as we look forward this year or/and as we look forward to the next three years, is from what we believe will be and hope will be a recovering economy. We're starting to see some green shoots on that now. I'm sure we'll talk about that through your questions today. The other half are CN-specific initiatives. Now, these are efforts that we're making with our customers that leverage our network, leverage that customer service levels that we're providing, where they're growing and we're growing with them. But they're making investments, or/and we are making investments together that's going to, it's gonna drive growth in, in both of our businesses. And that is with significant, a long list of initiatives. We've talked about different pieces of these. We'll get into details, I'm sure, over the course of, the next hour here. But that's coming on exactly as-- actually, it's a little bit ahead of plan as we watch those coming in. There's a lot of upfront investment. We're starting to see that volume move now, and it will form 50% of our growth as we look forward this year, as well as, you know, the next three years. So that is, I'm, I'm comfortable with that. We've got the pricing power that's gonna support the margins on them as well. And then the final piece that we've been working on over the last two years, of course, is the team. And, you know, it's important you have all the plans in the world that you want, but you need the right team in order to be able to execute them, and in order to be able to respond and anticipate all of what goes on in the world, it's moving very, very quickly. And, we started at the top. We now have a team that is a great combination of deep railroad expertise and some very different, you know, different eyes, different perspectives. And, what's really important. So we have some new folks, right? We've got some old folks right here, that have been around for a very, very long time. Thank you. Can I say, how many berries should I say? Very, very, a long time. But what's really important is the way that we're coming together, and this team is moving. She just runs our operating committee, where we bring the commercial folks together with the operations folks, with the finance folks, and their, you know, Ghislain's plan is to run a process that has us pull all the levers that is gonna have us execute the plan that we have and respond to whatever's coming up. So it's a collaborative, and very tight process. So I'm happy with where we are. Lots more to come as we look at growth in the future, but I'll maybe leave it there as context. Sure. So that, that's a great, great, introduction. Coming back to your, your commentary around green shoots. I often feel as a, sell-side analyst, whenever I say green shoots, I'm holding up a sign that says, "Green, shoot me. Yeah, you may be right. What are you seeing in the business? What are you hearing from your customers around the economy starting to get a little bit better? 'Cause it does seem like, at least in the U.S. side, looking at all the surface freight data, things are still kinda slow. Yeah. It's, I would say it's still we're cautiously optimistic. But one of the good things about our business is we're very diversified, so it's really—it's a tale of a bunch of different industries. So we saw very strong grain movements over the past number of months. We did expect them earlier in the season. Potash has been very strong. Those are less consumer-centric. Coal is a little bit off in the US, because it's thermal coal and metallurgical coal volumes. We'll have another mine opening up in British Columbia, so we're seeing some strength there. We're seeing some real strength in petroleum and in refined fuels and petroleum. Mm-hmm. Record kind of exports of propane, for example. We've got new fuel facilities starting up in Toronto. But automotive continues to be strong. The biggest kind of shift over what we would've been saying if we were here last year was the strength in the international business, the containers coming over. We've reconstructed our portfolio there to fit our Rupert corridor, our Vancouver corridor, and of course, we've got Halifax. It's a little soft right now because of what's going on in the Red Sea, but we've constructed this portfolio to fit our network, and it's really strong right now. So that is underpinned by some consumer demand, some restocking, I think, but we're gonna be watching that very closely as we go forward. Ghislain watches what? 150 or so- 150 economic indicators. Maybe I can add to what Tracy you're saying. You know, when I look at the volumes right now are holding quite well. I mean, when you look at our volumes in terms of RTMs in Q2, we're up 8%. And you were talking, Tracy, about Intermodal International. Intermodal International is up 22%. Petroleum and chemicals, which is a sign of, again, the economy and so on, is up 17%. And merchandise in and of itself is up 10%. So, you know, I think, I think the volumes are holding quite well. I think to your point, inventories have stabilized. We are not assuming that Intermodal International will come back to pre-COVID levels, but we're assuming in our modeling in this year that it will get better than last year. When you look at the economic indicators, and I know for shareholders, to your point, Tracy, we follow 150, but we gave one, which is industrial production. Industrial production in Canada started plus point three in January, and now it's plus point nine. So economists, they do forecast very often and change by small increments, so they can never be wrong, but it's going in the right direction. Same thing as housing starts. It started at one point three, and now it's one point four. So all of this is telling us that we're going in the right direction, but we're cautiously optimistic. Like, in our modeling, we did not assume that we would go back to pre-COVID levels, whether it's in Intermodal International, whether it's in lumber, whether it's in, you know, the automotive sectors and so on and so forth. So, you know, we're doing pretty good. And it's holding together. You know, I'll finish to say that lumber is stabilizing. That was the other big, Yeah ... weakness last year, if you remember, David- Yeah ... in Q2 when we hit the trough. And I would say that lumber, when you look at car orders, and I'm talking about center beams, 'cause these are like the sailboats with bundles of lumber. In the trough last year, we would have 1,600 or so car orders per week. We finished the year around 1,800-1,900, and we've modeled in that range, and I think we've been doing, Tracy, something like in the range of about 2,000. Yeah. So, you know, but there's ups and downs. When you look at every week, there's ups and downs on the demand, but overall, that's what we've been seeing, and there's still a shortage of houses in the US. And I think hopefully, people. Two things, I think. Number one, people don't believe that, you know, we will have a recession, which that was not the case last year. And second, interest rates, although now it's questionable as to whether interest rates will come down, and there will be some interest rate cuts, but people don't see interest rates going way back up. I think it's, people are seeing that it's either gonna be there or maybe come down a little bit, so that's good for housing starts. So, and that's good for lumber. So we're, you know, we're- Yeah, so- We're doing pretty good. Yeah, we are. And so if you look at the year, and we've kind of guided to mid-single digit growth- Mm-hmm ... it just says, well, I think we're about 3% year to date- Yeah ... but accelerating 8%, year-over-year on the second quarter. And we've talked about all the economic plays. We're watching all of the CN-specific initiatives coming in about on plan, and that's about half. Then if you look at, as we move out in the year, and you look at the compares, you'll recall that we had a pretty significant forest fire season that did impact more our customer operations than our operations last year. Right. We had a pretty significant West Coast port strike last year. So the compares, you know, the volumes last year went down a little bit. So we're pretty comfortable as we look out for the remainder of the year on where we're expecting volumes to go. Yeah. That West Coast port strike actually cost us 1%- Mm-hmm ... of volume growth. So we're not assuming this year that this will happen again, obviously. So You get to wait another three years till the contract's up. Yeah, exactly. So, one thing, when you think about, you know, feeling pretty good about the economy accelerating, is that a more Canadian thing, or is that also south of the border? Like, how do you guys- It's a little bit of both. Little bit of both. Yeah. It's a little bit of both. I mean, like I said, it's not coming back to the COVID levels. But when we talk to our customers, when we talk to the shipping lines, you know, demand is better than it was last year. Inventories are now back at normal levels, so they will have to be restocked. People are starting to consume. I mean, remember, last year people were worried about a recession and the interest rates, so they needed to know, where am I gonna cut? They didn't cut on traveling. I mean, if you look at traveling, and I speak to Michael Rousseau, the CEO of Air Canada, he's saying, "Ghis, I mean, you know, we're even short of pilots." So people are not cutting on traveling. People did not cut on restaurants. They cut on consumption. Mm-hmm. Now it's starting to come back because those fears are mostly behind them. So, you know, slowly but surely, but we can see the signs that. And it's not in one thing, it's across the board. PNC, you know, Plastics and Chemicals, it's frac sand. I mean, when you look at frac sand, Tracy, I think our volumes are up 50%- Yeah in Frac Sand, with some of the drillings that's happening- Yeah in Northern BC. In the north. That's right, exactly. So the place where really we see weakness is the thermal coal. This is coal coming from Southern Illinois, going to Convent, Louisiana, and then exported to Europe with some of the demand out there that's soft, and also the weak natural gas prices. Yeah. And frankly, I believe that thermal coal eventually will probably go away, but that represents—like, coal for CN represent overall metallurgical and thermal coal represents only 3% of our book of business. So that's one of our strength, too, is we're well diversified. The biggest segment we have is intermodal at 25%. Everything else is lower. As you think about the interest rate environment, you know, we had the CEO of Prologis, one of the bigger industrial real estate companies, probably the biggest industrial real estate company, around supply chain, yesterday for a fireside chat, and he was talking about how, you know, the construction part of his business is basically shut, right? The new builds on warehousing space has really, really come down as a result of interest rates. Does that have a chance of maybe still having some lingering effects on parts of the construction market, or? So I think we, you know, we look at as we look forward, a number of things. You look at the short term, building permits, housing permits- Yeah ... What's happening in the short term? Surprisingly, I mean, that's. It's not really high, but it hasn't plummeted. Mm-hmm. But as you look over the longer term, there is a structural shortage we know in housing in this continent. And so there's gonna have to be some work done on that and, and so we believe that over the longer term, this is going to be a pretty stable market from a lumber perspective. There's a question around where it's gonna come from and where, you know, is how much of it's gonna come from Western Canada, Eastern Canada, and the U.S. But structurally, housing needs investment. We're seeing the same things from an interest rate perspective. As you know, there's mortgages that haven't come up yet. There's gonna be a shock on those mortgages. But as Gis says, I think the encouraging piece is there seems to be some comfort that interest rates are no longer going up more. It's how do you manage the- Yeah -the current exposure as that happens? The thing that we hear about around whether it's in Canada or the US is just a general housing shortage. So we're gonna have to deal with that at some point. Okay. So you mentioned the guidance for the year being mid-single digit RTM growth. I know you guys have been on the road quite a bit and talking to investors. That guidance was initially met with a lot of skepticism. And as you've had those conversations with investors, can you help kind of maybe share with us what you think the market wasn't getting about your outlook and why that 5% growth in RTMs, even in this- Yeah sort of slowly recovering but maybe not super robust economy? I think they, they didn't perhaps get a couple of things, initially, although I think that, that most do now. Often the railroads will follow the economy, right? And so often we, we, you know, we're, we're—our volumes moving, often our early indicator of where the economy is going. And we all have a certain view, we're now calling it cautiously optimistic, around what the economy is gonna do. We're not sure, but it's feeling a little firmer than it was before. But 50% of our growth is not based on the macro economy, what it's doing. 50% of our growth is on specific initiatives with our customers that we're tracking very well, too. So we've got a fuel facility that we've talked about before, that's gonna handle kind of thousands of cars, is now open and starting to move. We spent, you know, a little bit of money up in northern BC to build an extra line for the frac sand, as Gis pointed out, is up 50%. We've just had an announcement. We've had a couple of big announcements at Rupert that will come into play in a couple of years, but we've got the canola crush facilities that we've been working on, starting to come on in the Prairies. We're now moving some of that early lithium down from the northern part of Eastern Canada into markets and for export. So these were all very specific initiatives that are unrelated to how the economy goes. So that's one thing I think that we've been able to drive some clarity to. The other one is that, what I just mentioned, was that if you-- what we've guided is year-over-year volumes. And we did have an impact last year from, on both the port strike and from the fires, and that took our volumes down lower than they would have otherwise have been, through last year, and so it's a bit of an easier compare. So if you look at those two things, along with a cautiously optimistic view on the economic drivers, we're, we're pretty comfortable in, where we are in a-- on a volume forecast. Yeah, I would say, I would say, Tracy, that it's exactly right. So investors at the beginning, when we said mid-single digit volume growth, call it 5%, people thought that we were banking on a positive economy way too much. When you break it down, to her point, half of it comes from our CN specific growth initiative. 1% comes from the fact that we are not assuming that there will be a West Coast port strike. So really, we're looking at the economy to give us about a percent, maybe 1%-1.5%, and we're assuming industrial production will not go back to 2%, which is what we've talked about as a supportive economy when we did our Investor Day. We're assuming slightly positive, call it 0.5%. That's what we're assuming. Yeah. So, when you demystify it, then people, because the other rows we're calling low single digit volume growth- Yeah From the economy, we're about the same. I mean, we're even probably, maybe a little lower, but we've got these CN-specific. What I like about those is they're diversified, they're across commodities, across geography. So if we're wrong on one of them from a negative standpoint, we're probably wrong on another one from a positive standpoint, then you've got the law of compensating errors. So we're not banking on one initiative, we're banking on a laundry list of initiatives. So we're quite positive about that. Okay. And then, you mentioned the Investor Day about a year and a half ago, and, CN had laid out a multiyear 2020 through 2026, 10%-15% EPS guidance range. We're starting a little bit at the lower end of that range. Can you kind of help quantify for investors how much of the CN specific growth projects are gonna be in this year, and what's gonna accelerate? Sort of maybe, I know that it, it's a big, broad, diversified business, but if you could get into a little bit more detail on some of the bigger items like AltaGas, and really help us understand kind of, you know, how much of this is really bankable growth versus, maybe it's gonna show up. Why don't I go through the initiatives, and you can sum up the numbers at the end. Does that make sense? I don't know. I'm not that good with numbers. Yeah, it's a big pattern. You're better than average. You're than average. You're better than average. Slightly better than average. So why don't we just go through some of the initiatives? I think we've spoken to many about too many of these, but I'll give you a kind of a roundup of them maybe. We'll start with the energy sector, and you mentioned AltaGas. So we're hitting records with the propane export to Japan, but there are other countries in Asia that's looking for as well. It was just this week that AltaGas and Vopak announced a final investment decision on a new facility, a new liquid facility in Prince Rupert, that'll be in operation, I think they said by 2026. Mm-hmm. And so we've got a contract, and this is one of the largest contracts we've ever signed with AltaGas for propane expansion to Rupert to export. And that's now gonna be supported by additional capacity as we look out beyond 2026. In the energy sector and how it's growing in natural gas, the Montney rich and the competitive abundance, it's the frac sand that we've built some capacity for frac sand to get up into Northeast BC, right in the key Montney areas that gets that sand very proximate to where the drilling is taking place. A number of partnerships in doing that. If you look at petroleum, refined petroleum, our volumes moving refined petroleum and fuels into Toronto right now and to Eastern Canada are up significantly. No bridges, we'll give you the number. But that's in greater demand, plus some of the pipelines in Eastern Canada are being derated. So in advance of that, we've partnered with two of the big players in that space. We've contributed some space in our Toronto yard. They are building tanks and big facilities. This will ultimately... We've just started the shipments. We've sold out even phase two now. And so this is gonna be thousands of railcars, but we're starting to see that move now, for example. We put a, if you think about, the ag sector, you know, everything that's going on in potash, but we're looking at, our partnerships put with the biodiesel up front, with the canola crush facilities. There's a number of that capacity announced. Some of those are starting to come into operation this year. So we've got money in the plan. We're seeing it come in, around some increased canola and canola crush and oil movements, coming out of there. If you think about a big part of our growth story was gonna be the international. And, we have reconstructed our portfolio coming in the West Coast, both Toronto and Prince Rupert. Prince Rupert's 1.6 million TUs capacity now- Yeah ... soon to be 1.8, and then 2, and they've got another facility that they can double that again. And so that volume is lifting per plan. And we've announced, or we haven't announced, the CanExport facility, the logistics facility, was announced, was it last week now? They got final investment decision, and this is the logistics facility. We're gonna haul railcar loads of various commodities, pulses, grains, plastic pellets, wood chips, and they will be transloaded at that facility into the containers. This makes Rupert an even more attractive place. Already, it's the fastest and the most economic way to get from Asia to say, Midcon of the U.S. That's gonna help by giving them loaded returned containers on the way back. And so that's very supportive. If you think about, it's early on yet, but we are starting to move, as I mentioned, the lithium in out of Eastern Canada and south. We've started our short sea service out of Mexico into Mobile, that goes up into Chicago. So it serves a port in Mexico that is not rail served, and so we're taking truck traffic and putting it up. And of course, we're looking at, we're advancing. I'll let you just talk about the interline relationships, the Falcon service with the-- and also our service with the NS. So these are all initiatives that we see manifest itself, and as we look at the plan, as we sit here in, I guess, is it June today? June? Uh, not, uh- May? It's the 31st. The end of May. As we look forward, that mid-single digit kind of plan, pretty much 50% of it, maybe a little bit more, is going to happen this year from those specific initiatives. As we refresh our view three years out, there's reason to be very optimistic on those. Did you want to talk about the interline relationship and maybe the numbers you want to throw out? Falcon. Not really. No? I'm kidding. So when we were at Investor Day. As you remember, we said that all of these added together would be 800-900 thousand carloads. Obviously, in our plan and in our guidance, we did not assume that everything would happen. But just as an example, AltaGas, we had a target overall of 40-45 thousand carloads of NGLs, and AltaGas locked, locked up about half of that already. So the notion is, you know, we're banking on this, this year to be half of our volume growth. And as you get to the out years, you get a compounding effect of some of these initiatives, because what happens is now you get the full year effect of the 2024 and 2025, you get the new 2025. So you'll get a compounding effect in 2025 and 2026 of some of these CN specific growth initiatives. And my, my hope, my belief is as the economy does a little bit better, maybe we'll not reach 2% by 2026, but we'll get away from the 0.5% in 2024, more to 1%-1.5%. Then hopefully we get from the low end of our range of EPS guidance of 10% more in the middle or hopefully to the top end of the range by 2026. So and like I said, what I like about this is, it's diversified, so it's not banking on one. It's a laundry list of about a dozen initiatives, so some of them will fall off. But, Remy, our new guy, by the way, which I'm ecstatic about him joining the team, and he's a, he's an enterprise leader, and I think that Tracy and I, and she's smiling, so I would like her to smile when she talks, when you guys talk about me more. But he's not sitting on his laurels, like, they're finding new initiatives, like this is a living thing. And then on the Falcon service, I'm quite bullish, and if you listen to a couple of conferences we've done in the past, I think this will change the way railroads need to work together in North America going forward. Because when you look at railroads, there's only three ways to grow volumes. You either grow with your customers, you either convince somebody to build a facility on your line, and then you've gotten that customer's commitment for the next 30 years, or you extend your network reach. When you look at us, we've got great network reach in Canada. We're the railroad of the North. We have better access to Canada's natural resources, but we're quite limited in the US. We have a straight fight from Chicago, New Orleans. So how do you do that? How do you extend your network reach? Well, you can do that through acquisitions, and we are, you know, hoping to get the STB's approval on the Iowa Northern. That's contiguous to our line. It gives us market access and geographic access to more grain and, you know, in Iowa and so on. These are gonna be small, class 2 railroads, and we're there. We have a laundry list of railroads that we would be interested in. It's got to be contiguous to our network. But the STB, I think, has spoken, that there will not be another round of class 1 consolidation anytime soon. I'll be, I'll be retired way before it happens. So how do you do it? It's gonna have to be done by partnership. And I think that when you look at, you know, the partnership we have with UP, and we've operationalized with Tracy, you know, started this with Lance Fritz and now with Jim. Jim knows us extremely well, good buddies with him and so on, and he understands it. When you look at our service, you know, from Montney to Toronto, 5-day service, and this is not about taking market share from other railroads, this is about taking long-haul trucking, 1,200, 1,300, 1,500 mile long-haul trucking, put them back on the rails. I think I'm pretty bullish, and I think you can expect, and investors can expect that there's gonna be more of these partnerships that are gonna pop up. And I think that, you know, not if, but we will be successful and we are successful in the Falcon service. I think that will be the model of how railroads needs to partner together and operationalize to get market share back from the trucks, which, by the way, David, and I'll finish on this, has been the most overly promised and underdelivered in the last 20 years. Let me just make a couple comments on that. So this isn't easy work, right? Railroads traditionally have optimized to their own network, so this is something that's new and it's heavy lifting. It's not natural for us. So it takes a commitment right at the top. And so, Fernando, Jim, and I get together frequently. We're getting together actually next week in Montreal again, and we need to be consistent with it. And the way this works is that we play this off into each other. If we were one single railroad, the three of us owned this whole network, how would this go? From a routing perspective, you know, so we have three guys together so that we can have a positive interface with customers. We have to be easier to do business with. Those are not always easy discussions, but we have them with the team in the room so that we're all aligned, that this is the way it's gonna go. It doesn't always optimize one or the other, so we have to do a lot of give and take in this. But I'm with Jim in that this is, this is small. We're up 47—the front end business is up 46% year-over-year, but it's off a very small- Tiny. It's tiny. It's a lot of work for very small, but this is our effort to step back in, as Jim says, to a market that we largely exited a number of years ago, and to demonstrate that we can provide the consistent truck-like service that is going to allow this, and it's good for climate and emissions, it's good for our business, but we need to demonstrate that we can do it. All right. So you've teed up an area that I was gonna get into a little bit later, but since we're on it. Growth, right? You missed—you, you didn't mention one of the other reasons, what ways that you grow, is you're in the right places, right? The growth in petrochemicals off the western part of Canada to feed- Convincing people to get- Globalization's supply chain and moving out of China into other parts, that's, that's just a good place to be. ... We get to be the, as you say, with a tremendously positive network. I get- So, you've got a group of journalists here, many of whom are not gonna be your typical railroad investors, and they haven't read the fact book. From your guys' perspective, at a very high level, what are those three or four things that's very, very unique about the CN franchise that differentiate it versus other railroads? I'll start, you can close. The very first thing, we touch all three coasts, but it's more than that, we've got optionality. On the West Coast, we have Vancouver and Rupert. Rupert's the fastest way to get from Asia to Midcon. If you look at the East Coast, we've got Port of Montreal, we access Port of Saint John, but we have Halifax, deepwater port, and when that volume's moving, it's a little bit lighter right now, but we've just had the largest container ship in the world, partner with PSA at Halifax. That is the fastest way to get from Southeast Asia into the mid of North America. So we've got port access and optionality. We've got Mobile and New Orleans on the south, and so it and a third of our business moves, you know, globally. We, as you made the point, David, we are the northern line in Canada, which means it's the best agricultural growing area, and it's where all the petrochemicals and the energy business is, including all of the inputs, like the frac sand. And in the east and the north, that's where the precious minerals are, the lithium and some of the other critical minerals that are starting to develop out there. We've got the flattest network on the West Coast of any North American railroad, which is a privilege. I've worked for another railroad who doesn't have a flat network, and it adds a lot of operating complexity. We have the best route around Chicago, which I think 75% of all volume in North America finds its way to Chicago. We've got the bypass around Chicago that takes off a considerable time, makes us efficient there. So we've got some real structural advantages, and we have an incredibly diversified portfolio. 3% coal, 25% intermodal, but it's diversified across commodity and geographically. A third of our business touches global markets, a third of it goes across the Canada-US border, and the rest of it is either within Canada or in the US. 65% of our business originates and destines on our line, but we're getting better and better at being partners with the other railroads on the rest of it on a single line haul. David, what did I miss? Not much. I think I'll finish on this, you've touched upon everything about the network. I think when I look at since Tracy joined, what has changed is really don't underestimate the value of the team, okay? The network, we had that network in 2018, 2019. We had the same locomotives, we had the same rail cars. What has changed really is two things. Number one, we've clarified the operating model we're gonna use is we're gonna get our trains on time. That was not clear, and if it's not clear, and if you're in Winnipeg, and you're a superintendent, and you've got a 7,000-foot train, and you know your incoming traffic, you've got 4,000 feet coming, you're gonna wait, and your train is supposed to go at 2:00 P.M., you're gonna wait another 2 hours to get that 4,000 feet, so that now you can maximize and optimize that train, and you optimize your region, but you suboptimize the network. So when Tracy came on board, I remember we had many discussions together with you, Tracy, and with the rest of the team, and we're gonna get these trains on time. Now, some people have said, "Well, now you agreed to run the train short." No, we don't, because now if that train continues to be short, we're gonna do two things. We're gonna push them in to fill it up, and two, we're going to tweak the schedule, but from a network perspective, to make sure that again, we run long trains. So the other piece is, she made, we made some key people decision to make sure we have the right people in the right spot, and the team is gelling, and the team trusts each other, and so on and so forth. And then there were some changes on the board. We have a brand-new board. When you put that together, you, you can have the best network out there, but if you don't have the right people in the right spot to convert that value, that network into value for shareholders and stakeholders, you have nothing. Very true. Do not underestimate the value of the team. Okay, so coming back to that topic of growth, before you mentioned, you know, really sitting down with the FXE and the UP and managing that business as if it were- as if you were one railroad. Yes. Sounds great, but you're not one railroad, and typically, when you're talking about railroad partnerships, and you're talking about interline moves, at some point, you got to divide the revenue. How do you get out of that being the hurdle that constrains that growth for highly competitive traffic? At some point, if you're taking 200 miles out of a 1,400-mile move, you know, it's not gonna be a prorate on a, on a percentage basis, but somebody's gonna make more money than the other guy, and you need both of them to- That's a tough one. ... walk away. And that's where we've always- But you have to do this from principle. Constrained them. The principle is this: if you can create the fastest service and the most direct route. We're working on a lot with our partner railroads. We've got a long list of efforts with UP and the same with some of our other partners, so this isn't the only one. But the principle of them all is that if you can offer the fastest route or the quickest turn times, the best utilization of assets, that's number one. So what way is that? I would say that we want the business that deserves it, that we, that should be on the line. We don't want the business that shouldn't be on our line because there's a faster route elsewhere, and I would say my colleague feels the same way. So when we look at it as one railroad, we choose the interchanges that have the lowest, lowest miles or the fastest time, right? And those are facts. And so it can be difficult for the commercial teams because we've worked so hard and sometimes for the operations team.... But we look, that's the rule as we choose that. And then you do your commercial negotiation on basis, based on the change in interchanges and change in mileage and workload, and who's doing the workload, of how you divvy up the revenue. But we are staying true to that first principle, which is fastest and shortest, and the most natural interchange. And so we're seeing, and through this process, some of our volumes that we were handling before, cargo volumes, are changing their interchange point. Because that is the only way to make this pie bigger, is to offer our customers service levels that are fast and consistent and efficient. And that's, it's a bit of a you gotta believe, but we do believe that there's gonna be more to move if we can do this well. Yeah, and we're interchanging information. So this partnership, you're right. Partnerships in the past have not worked, okay? So the naysayers would say, and it would be CEOs going and having dinner and, you know, nice press release and so on, but the partnership would never be operationalized to the ground level, and the ground level folks would screw each other up. What we've done here differently is, number one is, we have operationalized, so, so we know. So when we are in Markham, and we interchange with UP, UP brings their, you know, their train from Eagle Pass to Markham. We actually know the inbound and the incoming traffic as if it's our own line. We know it's coming. We interchange—we exchange information so that now we can be ready. We can have the track available in Markham so that that train gets there. We call up our crews, you know, an hour in advance. They get on, they exchange the paperwork, they exchange the TGBO, they get on the train. That train does not sit there for a couple of days. It sits there for maybe half an hour, an hour, and it goes. And we do that consistently. And then what we do is, we measure it. So every day, and she gets the report, I get the report. Okay, what has gone well? What has gone wrong? So that we can, if things have gone wrong, then you can have a constructive discussion about, instead of pointing fingers. And we all know that this is a win-win, because for us, it gives us access to Mexico, extends our network reach. For UP, gives them access to everything north of Chicago. So it's a win-win. And you're right. In the past, railroad would quibble, "Well, I'd like to interchange in Jackson, and well, because I get a bigger piece of the pie." I'd like to—to her point, when we did this, we said, "No, what's the best for the service, you know, for customers and to be competitive with truckers?" That's what we looked at, and getting a smaller piece of something is better than getting a bigger piece of nothing. One of the things, I'll just add one final point. This is, you gotta believe, because what would happen traditionally is the volume's still incoming. It is up, you know, 46% year-over-year, but it's still incoming. So, part of this is we leave the service in place. We don't muck with it because there's not enough volume. You leave it in place. That's gonna be the discipline we have to demonstrate to the market. So just to be clear, I'm not necessarily being a naysayer on this, but I do think that there are sometimes competing incentives on the economic side that do limit the growth, right? If you look at, like, east-west intermodal traffic originating 100 and 200 miles across the Mississippi River and going the other direction, rail share is way lower- Yeah over the same distance on one railroad. The way that we think- But how do you get around that economic issue? Oh. - and the sharing of the profit? So the way that we think about this is we're saying, let's use the UP, for example. The Falcon Service is kind of our banner for service, and it's one that we're leaning into, and the performance is going very well. It's complex because it's two countries, it's three railroads, but it's going very well. But it's one of a number of them. And the way that I look at this is that we may lose out on some of this, you know, to change interchange points or how mileage is, but as long as we're doing better off on the total. We have forest products business we're looking at, we've got biofuels business that we're looking at, we've got all of the truck business that we're looking at. So we look at it from a broader perspective. You don't have to win every piece. I think that's an important, and Jim and I talk about that a lot. That's an important way to think about that. You know, there's times where he's gonna go off and wanna do something that's... If I can't compete with whatever that is, then I'm out. It'll work with somebody else in the same thing. We talk about, you know, we've had a couple instances where it's better that CN work with someone else, something, and that's fine as well. You've got to bring the governments to the table on this. Okay. So, one of the things that has come up a couple times in discussions around Canadian National, because Prince Rupert being that gateway to the China trade into the Mid-Continent. If we're in a period where China is no longer the manufacturing floor of the world, and we're shifting more towards Mexico, big broad brushes I'm speaking in here, not like tomorrow. Does that create a challenge for you longer term, in terms of being able to continue to mine the economic value out of that port? One of the things I love about our network and our business is its optionality, right? So we've got the two coasts, the two ports on the west. We've got Halifax that we're constructing in a way, our business with them to pick up Southeast Asia kind of production that's gonna find its way into North America. But we have in Rupert, what makes Rupert the gem is that it is, it's a multi-commodity facility. We take everything up there. We do a lot of the liquids business up there. We do forest products business up there. So it is a big intermodal terminal, and you know, for everything that we can see, that's gonna last some time. Mexico could become competitive, so there'll be one other outlet. We like the positioning of Rupert as the fastest way. If you're in China, the fastest way to get to the Midcon is go through Rupert, and the most economic way. So if, if we can be competitive and make that lane competitive, you know, I'm perfectly good about it. ... Okay. So, coming back to North America for a second. Obviously, the landscape did shift a couple of years ago with CP acquiring Kansas City Southern, and that whole thing shaking out. How has that impacted your business, right? So, you know, historically, I've always sort of thought as, because you're the railroad of the North, you had a much broader set of destinations you could offer your customers, but you've got a little bit better market share. Now, they've kind of gotten a little bit of a leg up on that side. Is that having an impact on your day-to-day business? Forget about the growth opportunities, which you're- Yeah, I would say, you know, one of the things this team did very well, long before I arrived, is they were looking at all of that business, both the opportunities for CN, but also more defensively, kind of what the exposures were. And the team had in place already plans to cover up almost all of the exposures. So for a crude example, that we would have been taking an interchange into KCS, that could have then gone to another Canadian carrier, we now have a different destination. And so we're moving all of that business, but to a different destination that's not on the KCS. So a lot of that exposure, the plans were already in place to mitigate that. So there's really no downside exposure. What I have seen, based on my past in the industry, that this triggered something really interesting. We used to not work well together with other railroads. This has kind of put everybody off center, whether the UP, or the NS, whether any of them, and we are working together in a completely different way. And I think that that's gonna be a net positive for our customers, and for the potential to pick up truck business. It's just the way that we're looking at how we use our networks together, which started off as being defensive, and is now kind of much more offensive around where are the opportunities, to think about service levels and service offerings differently. And there's a whole new kind of way we come together on this, across every single one of the railroads. That net, as we look backwards on all this and back on it, I think that's gonna be one of the for the industry. Does that, does that include CP or does that just include the U.S. railroads? Yeah, I mean, we've seen CP do all kinds of, you know, more creative to get, you know, the Mexico into the Southeast and, and everybody's moving, and it's moving more quickly, it's more dynamic. I think it's gonna be more competitive. I think it's gonna be different and better services for the industry that we have. I think it's gonna be an advance. Okay. And then, as you think about the—we've talked a lot about the UP and the Falcon service and that partnership there. You guys have done other partnerships, I think, with eastern roads, with Norfolk recently. Can you give us any update in terms of, like, how that collaboration is working? Obviously, there's now a, I guess, technically a friend of CN at the head of Well, we've got friends everywhere. We've got friends of CN everywhere, you know, with the draft team of all the other railroads. So I think, yeah, I mean, this, you know, we have a partnership with the NS to go to, to, Kansas City and Atlanta. I think, again, remember, these are gonna start small because if you're a shipper and you've been given, your box to the truck, to the truck, for the last 25 years, you're not all of a sudden going to give it to the rails and say, "Go ahead." So we're being tested right now, and, you know, I'll test you with 30 loads, 40 loads. I like what I see, I'll give you more, I'll give you more. So this is just another example of another partnership, and as I said, you will see others, and we're working currently to get more of these because we wanna do that. I mean, I think that this is a way to grow volumes, and the US rails will be like us. They won't be able to get the double-digit EPS growth just on cutting costs. I mean, at one point, you can't do that only on one metric. You've got to have a little bit of pricing, you've got to have a little bit of volume, you've got to have a little bit of operational efficiency, maybe a little bit of help from share buyback, depending on where interest rates are, and so on after financing costs. When you put all of that together, we're shooting to be double-digit EPS growth, which we believe will keep our growth PE. They're recognizing the fact that CP, CP, you know, with KCS and the message that now railroads need to work better together, and I think you can start seeing this happening. I think that, you know, they, they are realizing that they need a little bit of volume, they need to grow, and that's one of the things to, is to extend network reach. So you'll see more of those, and NS is just another example, and, you know, I just congratulated Claude. I was supposed to, I asked him to play golf tomorrow morning, and he's, he's busy now, but he's the new Chair of NS, so happy for him. Claude, congratulations. And yeah, I mean, we're well positioned to do these partnerships because we have friends all over the industry. Okay. As you think about... Well, I don't want to get too far into the plumbing of the partnership stuff, but I still- I'm still trying to figure out how you get over the economics. So, I guess, we're coming up here to the end of our time together. So maybe, Tracy, I'm gonna leave it to you for some closing comments around, you know, why now is a good time for investors to be thinking about deploying capital into CN and what kind of the algorithm looks like, from a shareholder perspective? Thank you for that setup. So listen, as I come back into the industry, in particular at CN, you know, this is a, and we've talked about it today, David, a tremendous network that's got a lot of just structural advantages to it, that it's our job now is to leverage. And so we've got the strong network, we've picked the right operating model for this company. It's executing well, it's moving well. That gives us very positive customer service, which gives us pricing power. We've got inflation plus pricing power as we go, and this has allowed us, over the past two years we've had it in place to the end of the last year, as I said, to drive 23% EPS growth. As we look forward to the end of this year, with our growth, as modest as it may be, but with our growth projections of this year, we'll be pushing 35% ever since we've implemented this model of EPS growth and a growth of about 6%, say, on volume. So this is a model that works. We've got a strong balance sheet, really strong balance sheet, that allows us to be nimble, but it also means we've got a new target on leverage that uses out on when we can buy back shares. Our dividend policies remain consistent for as long as we've been a public company, which is our dividend increases run roughly in tune with how our earnings growth is. So I think this is a strong, consistent model. We've got a growth plan out there that we've got really good line of sight to, and this is one where, you know, it's important to us, and what we talk about all the time is we're gonna do what we say we do, and that's what we're gonna do. And this growth plan, over the next—we've got line of sight of we've guided to three years, but we've got line of sight beyond that. I'm pretty excited about, you know, the most important part of it, which is the team, right? 'Cause we can have a plan in place, but this engine has got to work no matter which one of us is sitting in the chair. And I like what I see over on our senior team. We've made the right choices, but we're doing that throughout the organization now, focusing on giving the next generation the right experiences, the right exposures, so that they're ready as they come up. And it's, there's no place I'd rather be. All right. I think, I think CN is in good hands with Tracy as a leader. You owe me $20 on this- Is it bonus season or something? Yeah, I'm not saying he likes it, yeah. But I'm not kidding. I think she's done great, and we're very fortunate to be able to work with her. And I think shareholders can see that, you know, she's made a difference. And like I said, I'm very fortunate to be able to work with her. I've been around for... And I've seen a lot of different leaders, but CN is in good hands under her leadership. Thank you. Well, thank you. With that, I would like to thank you all for the support of the conference, Tracy, and for everyone in the audience. Enjoy the rest of your day here with Bernstein, and we thank you for your support and your interest. Thank you.