Each level of government has a general area of specialty and an understanding of where things can be done. As an example, the regional municipality here is now just in its 21st year; it was eight former municipal units that were forced together into one body, and there are three operation divisions. As an example, for snow clearing, two of those divisions have public works employees doing it. The one we're in right now has contracting companies doing it. Contracting service is actually not efficient, and we're looking at public provision of the service, so sometimes public employees provide greater value for money. We've actually contracted out in Sydney because that's the way it was, and the service levels are down compared to the other areas. You can see in a snowstorm that the east and north divisions have better service delivery just from the effectiveness of government being able to do something better. Therefore, I think we have to talk about whether government is in the business of providing a postal service or whether it is no longer a public service.
I fully agree with other lines of business, if you can find revenue streams. We all know that Canada Post is very efficient and very good at moving parcels effectively. We all know mail volume is down for the traditional letter coming in the mail. I mean, I don't race to my mailbox to look for a letter, but I do go to it for goods and transactions that are about living your life.
I guess the question really is at the federal level. The discussion among your colleagues needs to be about what postal service is. Is it more effectively done at one level or another? Here, as I say, we have to weigh out what public servants do better, and in the case of public works, they actually do baseline delivery better than the contracting community. When it comes to other projects, the contracting community is very effective at doing some of the work that we can't do in-house.
I just don't want to speculate on the federal jurisdictions.