The brief I handed in contains the answers that our business community in Kenora gave to the questions.
As president of the chamber of commerce of Kenora, I also sit on NOACC, the northern Ontario chamber of commerce. We're very active in the whole northwest, not just in this region.
Our feelings and thoughts on Canada Post are that we would like it to stay. There may be alternative methods and modes, as we put it in answering our questions in here, that may satisfy the federal government.
For us in Kenora, we have home delivery, which seems to work very well. We also have rural post boxes as well as remote stations. For example, Keewatin is a post office, post office box, and rural delivery—two boxes—out in the country.
As far as Canada Post goes, in Kenora there's an outlet store at Shoppers Drug Mart. For us, I don't think it's used as heavily as the regular post office, open to Monday to Friday. They provide exceptional service, and you'll see that in the questions we've answered. We're very happy. At the chamber we use the postal service a lot. The company I work for uses the postal service exclusively with Canada Post, with Priority courier and Priority post.
In our particular urban area, Kenora, they have home delivery. That's just within distance of our main station post office. It seems to work very well. They have contractors delivering to the post office boxes external to urban—the non-urban, the rural country, which is a lot of what takes place in our communities. I will say that it works very well.
I've read some of the documents here. They're looking to see how they can cut costs and they are looking at the revenues. We can get into that. We can talk about the alternate-day service or whatever they're looking at. It employs a lot of people in our community. A lot of these communities were devastated when we lost a lot of the paper mills and a lot of the rail. Our communities have really gone downhill. To lose more employees, this time at Canada Post, would just be another nail in the coffin, basically. We intertwine with all the local people and all the local businesses.
That's the feeling from our area on Canada Post. We're happy with the service. We're also happy to see what alternatives are out there to help transform it into something we still want it to be.
Thank you.