Mr. Comuzzi, it's a very interesting question and issue you raise, as usual.
I welcome all competition in our business. I think it's healthy. It's good for us. It drives innovation to see what others are doing in the market, so I really welcome it.
The law as it stands now, though, puts an enormous responsibility on Canada Post that no other competitor has, and that responsibility is to deliver the mail at a reasonable cost to everyone. That's the obligation we have. That's an expensive obligation, and it gets more so every year, with a quarter of a million new addresses being added.
In this case, this is illegal activity. It is clearly illegal. We have six decisions; these companies are really in partnership with foreign posts in the world that have come into the Canadian market and picked up some of our most profitable mail, that being business mail destined for other countries.
We need the profit from that mail. That's the reason we were given the shrinking, shrinking, so-called exclusive privilege. There's not much exclusivity left to the exclusive privilege. That's the reason we were given the exclusive privilege: so that the portion of the market available only for Canada Post would help defray the huge costs of our service obligation.
I understand, and in some ways I feel exactly as you do. It is not good that a behemoth--the sixth largest employer, with a $1 billion-a-year pension responsibility--should be asking that others exit the market, but that's the arrangement the Government of Canada has put in place. Along with other aspects of our business, that is how we pay for the universal obligation we have.
Until we change that, new entrants into some aspects of our market are going to be watched by Canada Post pretty carefully; otherwise, we will have entrants illegally moving into the most profitable segments of the market without having any of the service obligations we have.