It all comes back, Mr. Speaker, to the first part when I was offering congratulations about being elected.
Usually when I stand in this House to offer some remarks on a piece of legislation, I say that I am happy to speak to the bill. Today nothing could be further from the case.
There is nothing happy about back-to-work legislation, and the piece we have before us now is among the worst this place has ever seen.
It is a blatant attack on workers and pensions and is emblematic of the contempt that the Conservatives display for hard-working Canadians. As I indicated before, this is exactly what the chief had mentioned.
We understand how this government feels about workers. When it comes to picking sides and using legislation to end strikes and lockouts, the government has one gear: overdrive. We have seen this with workers, and we have seen this with first nations as well.
Even Lorne Gunter, a columnist friendly to the Conservative government, stated on Wednesday that they are acting like bullies in the Canada Post lockout. It's not that I agree one bit with his prescription for privatization. He manages to completely ignore Canada Post's mandate when he asserts that the private sector can do the same job as the Crown corporation. I will speak to that in a moment.
What concerns us on this side of the House is that not only is this government choosing winners and losers in this dispute, they are forcing a lower wage on Canada Post employees than the corporation was offering, and the logic behind that has gone missing.
It would seem that Conservatives feel workers do not deserve to make a good living wage in Canada, that only management deserve defined-benefit pensions, and that the interests of the elite far outweigh the interests of the general public. How does driving down wages help the economy? It does not. It lowers the buying capacity of individuals. That much is certain. It makes it harder to buy a house, which in turn affects housing starts. It makes it difficult for children to pay for increasingly expensive post-secondary education, which makes it harder for those children to get better-paying jobs themselves. It increases the divide between the wealthiest and the poorest Canadians, a trend that has gone on for a 25-year run now in the wrong direction. It is another nail in the coffin of the middle class in Canada. It is not a prescription for a robust economy either.
We have to ask ourselves then, if this move does not help the economy, what purpose it serves. Could it be ideological? It would seem so.
Let us take a moment then to look at the main point in Mr. Gunter's article that I spoke about earlier. He suggests that the private sector could easily deliver the same services Canada Post offers, at which point he needs to take a look at the mandate of Canada Post which is to guarantee postal service to all Canadians. When people call for Canada Post to be privatized, many are looking at the $281 million the corporation made last year, and they are licking their chops.
If we privatize it, will all Canadians still receive postal services? I do not think so. I have already spoken about Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing. It is a vast rural riding and is exactly the kind of place that would suffer the most if Canada Post were to be replaced by the private sector. In rural and remote areas, postal service is arguably more important than it may be in larger centres.
Many people in my constituency have limited or no Internet options and they still write and receive letters. They cannot go online to do their banking or pay their bills. For them postal service is an integral part of day-to-day life. This is the actual postal service that this government, under another government agency, has locked out.
If we imagine what might happen if we privatize postal service in Canada, we can look at two different scenarios for places like Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing. Under one scenario there would not be postal service at all. Let us face it: there are postal routes in Canada that are not contributing to the $281 million Canada Post made last year. Most of those are rural and remote. If we allow for the private delivery of mail in Canada, I cannot imagine many people busting down doors to get their hands on the rights to deliver mail in places like Hearst.
Speaking of Hearst, right next to it is Constance Lake. It took us a year to finally get a post office there or at least some postal service there after there was no postal service delivered to that area. They had to travel over 40 kilometres. This is how we know that if Canada Post were privatized, we certainly would not see the services in those areas.
What we would likely see is a profitable portion of postal deliveries scooped up in a heartbeat and quite possibly the end of mail delivery in many parts of Canada.
The second scenario is one that sees rural and remote delivery continued but at a dramatically higher cost to the consumer. If we allow the real price of delivery to govern the cost of each piece of mail, the delivery of rural and remote mail will become exorbitantly expensive. It will add to the already high cost of living in these places, which has been exacerbated in recent years by the high cost of basic items, such as heating, and tax grabs like the HST.
We just went through a campaign during which there was a huge response to the message the leader of the NDP brought to Canadians. It was a message of hope based on making life more affordable, and it obviously resounded with the Canadian public, as we now sit as the official opposition. The NDP believes in the need to address the inequities in Canada's rural and remote communities.
Let me speak about Elliott Lake.
I see that the Speaker is getting up.