I come from Red Lake, Ontario. It's made up of five small townsites: Red Lake, Balmertown, Madsen, Cochenour, and McKenzie Island. Each is distinctly different from the others.
Madsen has a small post office right in town. It's approximately eight or 10 kilometres from Red Lake. Red Lake is the largest of the five townsites and has a post office on its main street. Balmertown is about 11 kilometres from Red Lake in the opposite direction from Madsen, and it also has a smaller post office on its main street. It serves Cochenour and McKenzie Island with the group mailboxes. They sort the mail in Balmertown and it gets trucked to the mailboxes in Cochenour. Folks from McKenzie Island come across either by private boats or by a a little passenger ferry, which we run, and then walk up to the mailbox and get their mail if they don't have a vehicle on the mainland. In winter, they can drive across an ice road. They have no service, of course, during freeze-up or breakup, which can usually be a couple of weeks in the spring and a couple of weeks in the fall.
We also serve the unincorporated areas around our municipality, which can be up to 30 or 40 kilometres away from the main town. There are a lot of people living out on little lakes and in tourist camps or what have you, who stay there all year. We serve a fairly large area.
I know it's kind of an overused term, but Canada Post is part of the fabric of Canada. I don't think too many people would want to see Canada Post disappear out of the landscape.
I was thinking on the way down here that they are also very close to municipalities in some ways, in that every year you have a budget. Those budgets, of course, are fun times. As a municipality, we're usually left with two or three options: raise taxes, cut service, or a combination of both. I'm pretty sure that we're not going to have 1,000 people come in and build houses in Red Lake anytime soon.
I'm guessing that you folks face the same problems. The problem, of course, is that nobody wants you raising their taxes and cutting their services, so somebody has to be the bad guy. Once you're the bad guy, you're going to be the bad guy for the rest of your life, so you just have to get used to it, bite the bullet, and do what has to be done.
It's obvious that Canada Post, or any large corporation, can't continue as they're going and hope to make money. Changes do have to be made. I'm sure in their heart of hearts most Canadians know that, and most Canadians want to keep Canada Post.
We've had problems in our community getting an individual to deliver the mail from Balmertown to the community mailboxes year round. It's solved now, but I'm sure it will pop up again in the future. As I said, it's fixed now, but when it's not, then the folks on the island and in Cochenour have to drive another eight kilometres into Balmertown to pick up their mail. Sometimes folks in our community aren't really happy with Canada Post, but you know what? They get over it, as they always do. Small-town Canada has very resilient people. They take what you give them and are happy to have it.
I believe at some point in Canada—and Drew or one of the other previous speakers may have alluded to it—we created a two-tier mail system. That will be a problem in the future, because people in Toronto are used to a whole different level of service from what we are. We're happy with what we have. There's certainly room for improvement, but nothing that's going to make anyone jump into the lake, let's say.
Thank you for having us here.