Government Operations Committee on June 6th, 2006

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

What was the nature of the accident? Were they doing their duty and the accident was as a result of unsafe conditions?

[Deborah Bourque]

Yes.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

At some particular point, could you present the information or the accident report on that?

[Deborah Bourque]

I don't have the information with me.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

No, no, I realize you wouldn't have it here. But could you access that and report it to this committee so we might be able to have a reasonable assessment as to just cause and reason for the said accident?

[Deborah Bourque]

Yes, we can do that.

I was just told that there were 150 successful WSIB, Worker's Compensation, claims last year alone.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

From rural delivery only?

[Deborah Bourque]

Rural delivery only.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Fine, thank you.

[Deborah Bourque]

Oh, yes. We don't even want to get started on the inside.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

I realize that.

[Deborah Bourque]

That has the second highest injury levels in the federal sector.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Okay.

I have another question. Going back to the potential closure of rural post offices, do you have a list of the actual rural post offices that have been closed? I would appreciate you tabling that with this committee as well at some particular point. If you have it with you now, that would be good, and if you don't, I'd appreciate a notification of that.

[Deborah Bourque]

Yes.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Do you feel that you are under any pressure and/or competition from the private sources for your delivery, particularly in the rural areas for the after hours?

[Deborah Bourque]

Rural mail delivery hasn't really hit our radar as being under threat by private sector competitors because there is not a whole lot of money to be made in delivering to rural communities. That's why we're so concerned about Canada Post's exclusive privilege. We believe that private sector competition is only interested in the lucrative urban markets. If Canada Post is not allowed to continue to maintain its exclusive privilege, competitors won't be interested in delivering in rural communities.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

I might just deliver a caution there. Once again, this is just a personal statement. I have been approached by many, many sources who say, “I wouldn't mind having that contract; I'd love to do that. If they don't want to put their arms out there because it's going to hurt their shoulder, I'll gladly take it on”.

I realize that's a shallow statement coming from many people who sometimes either overreact or don't have information. But I would suggest to you that if the market isn't being filled and there is a void, the competitive nature of society generally does somehow find a way to facilitate that. There are many people who would like an opportunity to work for an income--period. Is that a situation we could or should consider?

In your negotiations, I certainly would caution that you not simply live in this world where no one else would be willing to do that job in rural Canada. I have 14% unemployment in a portion of my riding. I can assure you that there are a number of people who would willingly step forward to do a number of jobs, in a number of ways. I just ask you to consider that.

[Deborah Bourque]

That's correct. That's primarily the reason Canada Post was in fact able to exploit these workers for so many years, because that was their response: “If you don't like it, I have plenty of people in this rural community who are willing to take your job”.

That varies based on the region of the country you live in. In Alberta these days, Canada Post can't get people to work at all, because there are better paying jobs in the oil industry, for example. But you're absolutely right, in many communities where you have high unemployment rates, people will work for a lot less than what they'll work for in urban centres.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

We'll now go to Madam Nash.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Bourque, and to you, Mr. Bickerton, for coming to our committee today and making your presentations.

I come from an urban riding in downtown Toronto. I have seen a lot of changes in postal services over the years. For example, I can go to my corner store now and there is a postal outlet. You can mail or pick up parcels, registered mail, etc. I don't necessarily have to go to the post office per se, which I used to have to do.

I wonder if you could describe a little more what you were referring to in your remarks when you said that over the last 10 years there has been a lot of exploration, I guess, of different ways of expanding the market for Canada Post services and exploring new ways of doing Canada Post business. Can you describe some of the initiatives that have been undertaken and where there have been successes or failures or changes over the last several years?

[Deborah Bourque]

In terms of the retail sector that you mentioned, over the past couple of decades, I guess, there's been more and more outsourcing of retail service to private franchises and drugstores and video stores, and things like that, at the expense of the corporate outlets. What we were able to do through this Appendix T, this joint committee that I've talked about, is to carry out experiments in terms of expanding hours at corporate outlets and expanding services at corporate outlets. That's been the criticism of the corporate outlets, that they're only open from, say, 9 o'clock until 5 o'clock, and that people who work during the day aren't able to get their parcels in the evening, like they can at the local mall or the drugstore, when there's a private sector outlet. So through Appendix T, we've been able to put in place initiatives where you can get expanded hours in the evenings and on the weekends in corporate retail outlets.

As for the types of services that are provided, we've recently started providing passport photos and applications at post offices, applications for student loans, more and more packaging material and places to actually wrap your parcels before you send them, and things like that. Through Appendix T, we've been able to make a number of the corporate outlets more responsive to the customer's needs and better able to compete with the private post offices.

We had one experiment where, for example, we put a corporate post office in a Loblaws store in Toronto, and that was tremendously successful. It was open the same hours as the Loblaws store and it was at the very front of the store. It was tremendously successful, with a lot of revenues for Canada Post. And we operationalized that experiment. That's the beauty of Appendix T, that you get to test the initiative with no risk to the corporation, and then, if it's a success, you operationalize it and roll it out across the country.

So those are some of the retail initiatives that we've been able to look at. For a while Canada Post was excited about the retail initiatives. I remember a couple of years ago going to these blue-skies meetings, where they were talking about really making the retail sector vibrant and really expanding and putting in place these flagship stores. Then all of a sudden, just like that, they went in the opposite direction. Two weeks ago we got 22 notices in the Toronto area for new private sector franchises—22 on one day—at the same time they're eliminating 17 full-time, unionized wicket positions in the corporate outlets.

[Geoff Bickerton, Director of Research, Canadian Union of Postal Workers]

At the delivery end—and I think this goes back to your colleague's question about competitive services—we negotiated a collective agreement in the year 2000 involving the establishment of several pilot projects, where we would attempt different things with the corporation. We would change our collective agreement on a temporary basis and try to do things differently. We ended up having an experiment in Winnipeg where we contracted in the delivery of an X-ray parcel project, which basically doubled the number of parcels delivered by Canada Post employees. Part of that involved a new delivery model and a lot of changes to our collective agreement, including delivery on weekends. It was a success, and in our last round of bargaining we brought this in and expanded it to the entire country. So right now Canada Post has invested about $50 million in the parcel delivery business, and we're changing our operations in all of the major centres, including changing our work rules.

In terms of delivery of letters, in Burlington, Ontario, we had a pilot project where we motorized the delivery of mail and basically put letter carriers into small vehicles, and we also attempted to deliver all the mail before 1 o'clock in the afternoon. It meant having our letter carriers start at 4 o'clock and 5 o'clock in the morning. We also had another project out in Kelowna that involved a lot of different delivery rules.

So I think, in general, we're very open, including in terms of what Sister Bourque said. We were the first post office in the world to have Internet access inside public post offices. We don't have very much of that any more, but we were the first to introduce it in the 1990s. I think we're very proud of the fact that our union has been able to work with the corporation for the last decade in attempting to introduce new services to the public.

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

Madam Chair, do I have any further time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Very short.... I've been very lenient.

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

Thank you.

A person in my riding raised with me this issue about the re-mailers that you refer to. Can you talk a little further about that? He was saying he wanted to get into this business. I don't really know much about it, but I'm glad to have the opportunity to ask you about it.