Hi, I'm Michelle Johnson, second vice-president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers in Windsor. With me is our local president, Phil Lyons. I am a retail clerk at Canada Post. Phil is a letter carrier. He is also astute on questions of pension and sustainability.
I'll begin with a few points. Corporate interests have gutted our postal system, decreasing services but increasing associated costs. Many balk at paying 85¢ for a stamp to pay a bill, but not at paying $40 or more to pay bills by purchasing Internet and paying online.
In Windsor's experience, since 2013 we have lost one corporate retail office—which was Sandwich post office, the oldest post office west of Montreal, over 100 years old—and our mail processing plant. Residents of Sandwich Town, a service-deprived area, no longer have banking services or postal services.
Some of our Windsor-to-Windsor mail, which supposedly maintains a service standard of two days, now takes seven to 10 days via Toronto. The service decline encourages people to not use the mail if feasible in their case.
Many seniors and new Canadians still rely heavily on postal service, as do people whose income levels prevent them from purchasing Internet services. There are still communities without reliable Internet. Canada Post and their corporate partners have offered incentives to pay bills online. Again, these incentives are limited to those with access. Aging parents, seniors, and the poor are disadvantaged.
Further to our Windsor story, in August 2015, as you heard earlier, Canada Post converted the town of Tecumseh, which is part of the Windsor post office, to community mailboxes. A strident community fight-back campaign went unanswered. In the middle of the federal election campaign, CPC rushed to shoddily install these postal boxes. Little safety forethought was utilized in their Google map planning of these installations. Many are traffic and safety hazards due to locations. CPC didn't even follow their own criteria in regard to access, traffic, and lighting. As well, contractors perched these boxes in locations with no sidewalks, on uneven mounds of loose gravel, at precarious angles. To this day, one year later, most issues are not resolved.
A new letter carrier restructure has been set up for this fall, 2016, and a few of the more dangerous ones will return to door-to-door delivery. Unfortunately, we feel that some of this is due to the affluence of the complainants, as well as the safety aspects. We feel many in the core of town who are seniors are being needlessly put out by these hazardous boxes. Seniors who receive medical dispensation will have to reapply each winter for weekly home delivery.
The former Letter Carriers' Union of Canada used to work in conjunction with Canada Post on a program called letter carrier alert. Under this program, letter carriers acted as a lookout for things amiss while delivering mail on their routes: an ailing senior, mail piling up in a mailbox, fires, loose dogs, etc. The current Canadian Union of Postal Workers has a new proposal to revive this program as a community elder watch.
Our corporate retail post offices offer a different perspective than contracted-out retail outlets. Our highly trained clerks have usually worked in the post office for more than 20 years. Their experience is not just retail, but includes postal systems and services, starting from their previous work in processing plants or letter carrying. In addition to detailed product and service knowledge, staff must know over 60 complex, but required, corporate procedures. When clerks have the knowledge of the path of letters and parcels and all the quirks of the postal service, they are more capable of serving their retail customers, providing an all-round positive customer experience.
The public retail postal network plays a role in representing a respected federal institution to the Canadian public, in providing a stable infrastructure that communities need to thrive and businesses need to grow.
In terms of labour relations, Canada Post has taken a cynical tack in dealing with its workers over the past 11 years as it tries to dismantle the service in a very negative way, dragging down the morale of workers, taking away the tools of their work, cutting staff, closing plants and retail offices, and cutting services such as door-to-door delivery. This makes for a very demoralized workforce.
Many of us have been postal workers for decades. Management actions have us all swimming upstream. The service under the Canada Post Corporation Act is provided from coast to coast, to every Canadian, even the most remote. The post office needs a positive agenda to move things forward with expanded services, some of which will be mentioned later today, such as postal banking, nutrition north, or grocery delivery. The post office connects communities, people, our country, face to face, unlike any other entity we know of.
Thank you for your time.