Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, a fellow Winnipegger, for his address. I wonder if he is aware, though, that the $3.2 billion shortfall in the pension can be traced back to its origins in the fact that it was an underfunded pension plan, and that for the last decade or more Canada Post has been generating a profit and submitting that profit to general revenue.
Does my colleague know that the mandate of Canada Post is simply to deliver mail to the greatest number of Canadians at the lowest possible cost? Nowhere does the mandate of Canada Post include giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year in dividends to the federal government.
Had Canada Post been funding its pension adequately with that money, instead of putting it into general revenue, we would not have an underfunded pension.