Simply having a process to be able to reverse charges would be incredibly helpful. Right now, the surcharge can be levied within hours of a mailing being inducted. If it is determined that there was—the expression that I hear quite often—“overzealous application of the rules” by the Canada Post employees and it's determined that it is not a correct surcharge, it can take weeks or months for that surcharge to be reversed. We have a segment of our membership that prepares mail for third parties, and the bill goes directly to those third parties, so all of a sudden that client of theirs is being slapped with a $20,000 fine that is due and payable while that mail house is attempting to reverse that surcharge, and that could take months.
In terms of pricing, I want to show you the arbitrary nature of how this pricing works. People understand what happened with the postage. Canada Post also licenses data products that are used to support the mail industry. Last year, the price of one specific database was just under $20,000 per year to license the data set. This year, a company that uses that data will be paying almost $250,000 for the same data. That's in one year. It went from just under $20,000 to $250,000. There's no recourse, there are no appeals, and there is no way to change that.