I can. Many of you, including Mr. Temelkovski and Mr. Albrecht, will know that I've been living with this issue for several months now, pretty well day and night. Let me tell you about the range of options we're looking at, because we're looking at every option right now.
When someone refuses to work, we have an immediate situation on our hands. We have to decide how we're going to get the mail to people. If I have no notice that someone is going to refuse--they show up at 8:30 in the morning and say, “We're not delivering the mail to this group of addresses today”--I can at that point choose to suspend mail delivery. Or I can choose to get the mail to some other place so that at least people can pick up their mail. It's not convenient, but I need to take a stopgap measure. Those are the only two choices I have at that instant.
I and all of the colleagues working with me on the issue then immediately go into high gear. We notify the leadership in the community, we notify the households that are affected, and we notify you as the elected representatives of the people in the area. We immediately go into high gear to try to get views from the individuals affected--i.e., “We've had to put your mail here, right now, due to a safety issue with respect to that group of stops. Can you, as Canadians, tell us what would be a reasonable alternative, a convenient but safe reasonable alternative?”
It takes us several weeks to get that information, and we do it in several ways. Sometimes we do it one on one with individual Canadians. In other cases, as some of you will know, we have had town halls--in Fredericton I had four town halls in the space of a week--to gather together Canadians' views on what is reasonable.
In addition, we look at the alleged safety hazard. Sometimes it is a road safety hazard, but in three-quarters of the cases it is an ergonomic issue.