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.