Thank you.
I'll talk a little bit about the community itself. There are 3,400 people on the band registry, of which, I would say, a thousand live on reserve and two-thirds are off reserve and sort of scattered throughout the region.
We get only once-a-week mail service, so that's four times a month that we get mail brought in, usually through a contractor air service. We're semi-remote. Prior to that, HBC ran our post office. Then when we got access to the community back in the eighties, I guess, we had access, and subsequently people would move and get services in town. They would go shopping in town. HBC had the monopoly on grocery shopping and all that prior to that, but a lot of people with road access were able to go to town. They even got mailboxes in town. Hudson is our closest town.
Frenchman's Head is across the lake from Hudson, which has the POV 1X0 box number, and a lot of my business mail comes to Hudson and we pick it up. It's 10 minutes away by vehicle. There are three northern communities—Canoe River, Whitefish Bay, where I live, and Kejick Bay—that get their mail brought in once a week through this contractor.
Now that we have road access, they drive the mail in and it's put into this little office where they put the mail in each little...and you go and pick it up. It's open four times a week. It's open for three hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday; on mail day, it's open for six hours. We get $24,000 annually from Canada Post to manage and run the facility.
There is no cash on the premises. There are no money orders and those kinds of things. We don't do that. We used to, but there was an issue with irregularities and fraud and theft back in the seventies, so that particular convenience was taken away from us. Now a lot of people get CODs and pay them outright, and there's no money kept there.
I did talk to our post office person there this morning, and she would like to see an increase in her wages. She gets $15 an hour multiplied by roughly 15 hours a week times two weeks, so she gets paid for 30 hours every two weeks, which is very minimal. She would like an increase and would like the mail to come in maybe two or three times a week. I think she's kind of opposed to mailboxes also. People would be tampering with them and perhaps people would be losing keys and there would be damage. There is no third party pickup at the post office. If you get a cheque or a pension cheque, you have to pick it up yourself.
I'll leave it at that and stop there for now.