Government Operations Committee on June 22nd, 2006

[Moya Greene]

No, I'm not aware of any changes on the part of the government with respect to its ownership of Canada Post. In my opinion, as the CEO, it is for the shareholder, the government of the day, to decide what, if anything, it wants to do with the shares, the value that it has created in Canada Post. That's their decision. I'm not aware of any discussions at all, whatsoever, around the privatization of Canada Post.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you.

Do I have more time, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You have two more minutes.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Great.

There were questions raised already about health and safety at Canada Post. I understand that the injury rate at Canada Post is one of the worst in the federal sector, that in 2005 there were almost 10,000 compensated injuries--not just complaints or claims filed, but actually compensated injuries. Can you tell us about your strategy to bring the injury rate down?

[Moya Greene]

Absolutely. These numbers are very worrisome indeed. In fact, when I saw that we had 8,000 accidents in 2005, I have to tell you I was shocked. Thankfully, only 4,000 of them required any time off work. Still, 10,000 people requesting light duties in any given year, and 8,000 people having accidents....

We have to remember that this is a big country. It's cold in the winter and it's icy underfoot in lots of places and our letter carriers are out there delivering the mail in all kinds of weather, and lots of times there are slips and falls. Thankfully, the injuries that happen at Canada Post are usually not life-threatening, but there's no question that the number is very high--worrisomely high.

Here's what we have done. Under Mary Traversy, the new senior vice-president of employee engagement, we have made employee engagement our number one priority. Under that rubric, we have employed 16 new occupational health and safety experts who have been deployed in the field in regions across the country to help bring to Canada Post, on a day-by-day basis, much greater awareness than we have had and a culture of safety in our company.

In other companies in which I have worked, the safety discussion that takes place at the top of every shift needs to be embedded as part of the operation of Canada Post, and that's what these occupational health and safety experts will be doing. They are creating plans; we have targets in place for every plant and for every depot to bring the rate of accidents down with the help of occupational health and safety experts, and to help our supervisors work with employees so that the environment in which they work is a safer environment for them than it was in the past.

There is also the corporate team incentive. The corporate team incentive is the incentive given to the management cadre of the company, usually for the financial performance of the company. For the first time in the history of Canada Post, 25% of that team incentive this year will be granted on the basis of how well we're doing on what I call the employee engagement matrix. One part of that matrix is a reduction in the rate of accidents across the country, so it is--

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you. We'll go to the next questioner. It is Monsieur Bonin.

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Merci, madame la présidente.

Thank you, Ms. Greene, for being here.

I have three points I want to cover, and I have seven minutes, so I apologize now if I interrupt. If I think your answers are too long, I'll have to interrupt--

[Moya Greene]

That's fine.

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

--because I need to get them done.

My first point will be very quick.

You committed to this committee to do an assessment of historical sites, of post offices that are historical properties--the value and the disruption of that status of building for the operation of the local post office because it's filled with tourists. Is that report forthcoming? Paul Szabo asked me to ask that.

[Moya Greene]

Mr. Bonin, I will have to get back to you on that and see where we are. The head of real estate has that, I know, as part of his program, but thank you for reminding me. I will get back to you personally in a week with the answer on that one.

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Through the clerk we'll have it.

[Moya Greene]

It will be through the clerk of the committee, yes.

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

I had suggested to Monsieur Ouellette at a similar meeting that instead of delivering mail to most of the homes, with new construction not getting home delivery or door-to-door delivery as a result, he consider delivering mail three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday in my area, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday in his area. I don't need mail everyday any more. Before there was a stack of mail everyday, but as you've mentioned in your presentation, there is less and less mail, and there's going to be even less yet. I think it's unfair that I should receive mail at the door and a person who is building their $3 million home very close by does not get home delivery. I'm not asking for an answer, but I'm hoping that senior management is discussing this, because I think it's a good way to serve all Canadians.

The major point I have is that in your presentation, you use “I” an awful lot. I sense in my contact with Canada Post that it's very centralized, very top controlled—almost like the Prime Minister's Office.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

You even said that decisions made at senior management have to be embedded, which is why you hired 16 people to embed those decisions. I want you to know there are some very intelligent people working for Canada Post in our communities.

I did have a problem, as you know and as you mentioned. I did not get forewarning, but I found out from constituents, when we got the calls. I had to carry all of the blame for it, because I was the first contact that people made. I called a town hall meeting and your representatives came. They did as good a job as they could; I sensed they weren't free to speak their minds. When I do ask specific questions locally, they cannot make a decision; they have to check with somebody outside of northern Ontario.

A perfect example of this was a dead-end street, where there was a totally handicapped lady in an electric wheelchair in the last house. They forced her to use her electric chair to go up a hill to the neighbour's mailbox, because they said it was unsafe to drive down that hill—which had been ploughed by the town. Locally, everybody sympathized with this lady using her wheelchair. I went back three times and asked them to go to higher-level management, which was always outside of northern Ontario; a local decision was never made on it, because they would have said we're going to find a way to get you your mail. Finally, on the third time they said no, I said, watch the local news this evening, as I'm going to the media with this and the lady and I are going to go and pick up her mail. Instantaneously the problem was solved.

I sense that your operation is too centralized. We've had problems with that in northern Ontario with FedNor and Human Resources. In northern Ontario, we don't want to call Peterborough or Ottawa, or anywhere else, for our decisions. We're intelligent people and can run our operations, and the post office there doesn't belong to Ottawa; it belongs to the people in my riding.

I say this because I had a problem with delivery. I have 52 communities, and I'm going to have a lot more problems. You say you spend seven days a week, 24 hours a day preventing problems. What solutions have you found that will make it different for me the next time somebody calls and says, I'm not getting mail delivered? I have 52 communities.

[Moya Greene]

Mr. Bonin, first I want to apologize for any service disruption. I cannot tell you how important a matter this is for Canada Post, that Canadians anywhere in your constituency...that this should be laid at your door. I can only apologize.

In terms of what we can do to prevent it in the future, I can only tell you that there are 4 million rural points of call, Mr. Bonin--4 million. Only 850,000 of these rural points of call get service to the lot line. The other rural Canadians are picking up their mail at a post office, getting their mail in a superbox, or getting their mail in one of the green collective neighbourhood boxes that you sometimes see in cottage country, where eight or twelve households are coming together to an area.

When someone refuses to work, I assure you we don't get very much notice either. If I had more notice...that's what I am saying. If I had more notice, the disruption would not be as bad as it has been for your constituents, for example. But if I have notice.... What I'm doing is trying to figure out these 800,000 points of call that are getting lot-line delivery now, which is where this problem is concentrated. There's no issue around superboxes or getting the mail at post offices, because nobody's saying it's unsafe to go to the superbox or to the post office. It's only the lot-line delivery that people are saying is unsafe.

If I get some notice, I'm able to go out with regional and local officials. I'm able to say to the people who work in those areas “Can you go and look”--

[Raymond Bonin, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Again, you say “I'm”. I don't suspect that the problem is solved in your office. It should be solved locally.

[Moya Greene]

Let me rephrase it then. That's probably a bad way of saying it. Let me rephrase it. The company is able, with regional and local officials, to go to the area to actually look and see what alternative we can put in place. In that case, the company officials locally, personally, go to those doors and ask Canadians what would be a reasonable alternative, given that we have to discontinue lot-line delivery.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

I'll go now to Mr. Wallace.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Greene, for coming today.

I have a somewhat opposite opinion from my colleague to whom you were just speaking. I'm fairly new here, but we have witnesses to a number of events and there's usually a plethora of people to whom they pass the buck. I appreciate that you're sitting at a table here and taking complete responsibility for the organization you represent. I commend you for that.

I have two questions, and they're similar to what I asked the union representatives we saw a couple of weeks ago. I did a little research on other issues with Canada Post, and one was absenteeism. I think you did a very fine job in your opening statement indicating that you're in a very competitive business environment and productivity can make the difference between profitability and non-profitability. When I looked at it, the information we got from Canada Post--it came from your HR group--was that in absenteeism you're averaging 15.5 days per year.

I think it goes to Ms. Nash's point, probably, that some of that is due to this large injury reporting you're getting. But your numbers are even higher than construction, which I think would probably have more likelihood of injury.

Do you have any comment, first of all, on why there's such a high absentee rate at the post office, and, second, what do you think you're going to be able to do about it?

[Moya Greene]

The rate of absenteeism at Canada Post is higher than that at other companies. I believe that the success of the company in the future depends upon all of our people being engaged in that success and all of our people understanding, better than they do today, how the competitive landscape has changed and what the customers are expecting of our company. We have a major strategic initiative under way in the company to bring the customer closer to the shop floor, to bring the ideas and the opportunities that our customers have about providing postal services in a different way, and to help our people understand that there are big changes happening in the landscape.

Besides this, we have retained medical experts to help us understand why a particular problem in one region requires a certain level of absence but in another region seems to require a much higher level of absence from work. We're trying to understand more completely than we do today why that is, so as a company we are retaining more expertise than we've had in-company to do that.

There is a third thing that I think will help. Employee engagement is all about everybody feeling connected to the whole company and feeling that the task they do actually has a relationship to the overall goals of the company. We have instituted a new training program for our supervisors. We have 3,000 supervisors across the country. Their ability to communicate customer expectations to our people on the night shift, on the evening shift, in the plants, and in the depots, and to help our people feel attached to the overall success of the company is a critical part.

So I think all of these steps need to be taken together: getting more expertise on the shop floor and in the letter carrier depots; training our supervisors; and helping our supervisors become better leaders, so they can lead our people in their understanding of the competitive landscape. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, a portion of the corporate team incentive this year will go to employee engagement, which includes a reduction in absenteeism.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

You actually have a senior vice-president in charge of employee engagement?

[Moya Greene]

Yes.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

On a flight recently, I had the fortunate luck to sit beside an individual who is a senior person at the post office and who talked to me about this program you've got going. Would you be surprised to hear that I asked the union representatives about the employee engagement program and their response was that they really didn't know much about it and what its purpose was and whether it had any effect all? Could you explain to me where you are in the evolution of this program and what you have done to communicate what the expected outcomes are?

[Moya Greene]

We just built the strategy in January. We started communicating the elements of the strategy through 16 regional forums that were attended by all of our supervisory people. For the first time in the history of the company we've brought our supervisors together to lay out the elements of the strategy. It was communicated to our 400 most senior executives of the company. It is communicated every month in a letter that I write to every single employee of our company. It is communicated to our people every month in progress reports on how we're doing. It's communicated at the local and the regional levels by plant managers and the supervisors in charge of depots. People are starting to become much more aware of issues like accidents and absenteeism than they were in the past. So it is being communicated I think very vigorously.

In terms of actual union discussions, we have union discussions pretty well every week at the local level. It has been communicated twice by me at the national level, so I am surprised.