The single largest issue we're facing is the decline of letter mail. In its early days, between 1969 and 1975, letter mail grew by a billion mail pieces. Between 2006 and 2015, letter mail declined by 1.6 billion pieces. So our biggest challenge is to overcome the financial gaps that will be created by the very core business that has been the purpose of the corporation for at least the last 50 years.
We do not see the decline of letter mail; on the contrary, we see the decline of letter mail accelerating. When you open a bank account now, or open a cellphone account, your default option for getting your monthly bill is electronic. Increasingly the default option for virtually all communications is electronic. So we suspect that this acceleration will gradually increase. We're seeing this in media, we're seeing this in publishing, and we think this will continue to be a significant pressure on the corporation.
On your question about opportunities, we have looked at several areas of opportunity. The one we found where we had the core competencies was to deliver parcels, but parcels is still a quarter of our business. Even if we grow parcels extremely well...which is what we have done over the last two to three years in particular. In fact we are very proud of the work our employees are doing, day in and day out, winning in a highly competitive environment. Canada Post continues to deliver great service to retailers. But we think that opportunity will not be sufficient to overcome the size of the problem.
We also have a pension plan that has over $6 billion in solvency deficit.
Under the temporary relief, we are not contributing to the solvency deficit. If we were required to contribute, that would, again, be $6.2 billion over five years, and that type of financial strength is not there. The corporation's challenges will simply continue to mount in the absence of viable solutions that can be implemented and that play to the core strengths of our corporation.