Thank you.
My name is Mike Palecek. I'm a letter carrier from Vancouver, and I'm the national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
With me is Jan Simpson, our first national vice-president. We also have our entire national executive board seated in the gallery. That's our leadership from across the country. We don't quite have 22 vice-presidents like Canada Post, but we have leaders across the country who are here today.
We represent about 48,000 postal workers at Canada Post in two major bargaining units. We've been actively involved in the very creation of Canada Post as a crown corporation and in fact every review of Canada Post since then. We built Canada Post, and we have a better understanding of the day-to-day operations than anybody.
Like some of the others here today, we're very concerned about the report from the task force. We believe it's a very flawed document. We're concerned that the committee's consultations will be based on this document and therefore tainted. The paper is filled with errors, with misrepresentations, and there are serious omissions as well. The CUPW will be providing to this committee a complete detailed breakdown of that at a later point. For now I'd like to touch on a couple of examples of this.
The paper predicts that Canada Post will lose money this year, even though all signs point to the contrary. They've had a fantastic first two quarters. It also completely omits that in the first two quarters of this year, for the first time, the growth of parcels has eclipsed the decline of letter mail. We expect that trend to continue going forward as parcel delivery grows. As a matter of fact, the German post office announced this week that they expect their parcel volumes to double by the year 2025. We expect to see similar things in post offices around the world.
It also notes that CUPW and Canada Post recently signed two tentative agreements, but fails to mention that one of these agreements includes important changes—changes that Canada Post told us are necessary for the corporation to considerably expand its market share in both parcel delivery and direct mail.
The task force paper says that only 7% of supporters of postal banking would use that service. That is factually incorrect and not what their survey said. The survey they conducted was of the entire public, not just supporters of postal banking. They found that 7% said they would certainly switch to postal banking or use its services. A further 22% said they would probably switch to postal banking. I don't think you could find a bank in this country that would not be happy with 29% market share of banking. And yet from this they tell us they don't think this is the best option moving forward.
We've heard from people across this country—from rural communities, the urban poor, and all sorts of people—that these services are urgently needed. Unfortunately, we don't have time to go into all of the submissions we've put together today. As you can see, they're hefty, and that can't be done in five minutes, but the vast majority of these issues were not addressed in the task force report.
We've prepared submissions on the financial situation of Canada Post Corporation and a pattern of deception and misinformation from Canada Post management. Year after year, Canada Post predicts that their revenues and profits will be substantially less than they are. It appears they've done it again this year. It was by about $100 million last year and about $500 million the year before. We simply have no faith in the predictions and projections they have made.
We've put together submissions around home delivery and the importance of maintaining it, and about how Canada Post can be used to help green the economy and green its own services. These are important issues. This government has made big commitments around climate change, and it needs to use the crown corporations. It needs to use its assets in order to bridge those gaps and make those commitments. Again, we see nothing on these.
I understand time is short, so I'll leave it there. I look forward to your questions.