Back to CP-NS, EHH's statement at the JP Morgan Conference Last week:
"People need to get their heads around the idea that fossil fuels are “probably dead,” the CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway said Wednesday.
It is another very effective strategy to try to influence shareholders to vote for CP-EHH to save the company from impending doom. The underlying unspoken connotation seems to be "NS - you guys are toast because you have depended on coal and that is a dead horse. You need me to come in and run this place because you only know how to do coal and that's not going to be there anymore and you can't save the sinking ship, but I can."
The fact of the matter is the US Government is working hard to make coal extinct. Impossible-to-achieve emissions regulations shutting down hundreds and hundreds of power plants, and also making it economically unfeasible to build a new coal plant, plus a recent "moratorium" announced on any future coal leases on Federal Lands in Western States are examples of the policy of the US Government to regulate coal mining out of existence over the next several decades.
Of course, one can make the economic argument regarding natural gas fracking impacting coal, but while that would and has resulted in less coal use, by itself it would not put the coal industry out of business.
And natural gas fracking is not a "safe" technology from existential regulations, either - it, too, is in the gunsights of the EPA but most of the regulatory fire right now is being trained on the coal industry at this time, with devastating results to many states and tens of thousands of families
So EHH is very astute in trying to use that policy to his advantage in the CP-NS skirmish for control.
Maybe, as mentioned by others, he will bleed the assets as coal mining in the US is regulated to extinction, or maybe he will sell the branchline assets and coal export terminal to a shortline, single track the NW and redeploy the rail elsewhere, grab his gain on the coal assets, and focus on other areas to bring that Operating Ratio down.
But it is quite the play for approval of his resolution by NS sharesholders, and it just might succeed.