My name is Gordon MacDonald, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before the standing committee to speak about our public post office.
Canada Post is a public service, one of the few public services we now have left in Canada, and Canada Post is a very profitable corporation, having had profits in 20 of the last 22 years.
I've worked for Canada Post for 31 years, and I've never seen such an outright attack of its own business as I have seen in the last four and a half years.
Here in Cape Breton we no longer prepare and sort our mail for the island. Canada Post now ships it to Halifax to be sorted and machined. Where it always took a one-day turnaround for local delivery, it now takes three to four days to get the same mail back to our customers locally.
We lost two and a half well-paying jobs here in small-town Cape Breton so that Canada Post could justify paying over $2 billion for letter-sorting machines when they knew Lettermail was falling off. It seems nobody wants to address this poor management.
Let's talk about Lettermail. Lettermail is mail like our power bills, cable bills, birthday cards, etc. CUPW is very aware that this specific revenue has been decreasing. I must stress that this is the only product that we have seen a decrease in, and our parcel sector is making Canada Post busier than it has ever been, with profits we have never seen before. Normally, we were a seasonal profit-driven corporation, but with revenue profits now coming in the second and third quarters, this is a great sign that Canada Post is on stable ground.
Canada Post is trying to eliminate our letter carrier delivery and have everyone go to community mailboxes down the street to get their mail. When I first started 31 years ago, security of the mail was paramount, and we were instructed at all costs to protect the mail. Today, in 2016, I've never seen such a disregard for the security of our mail. A community mailbox is made of aluminum door panels, and any would-be thief could pop those open with a screwdriver.
I can tell you for certain that our mail and the products you and I ship through Canada Post are of great value. People still mail rings, heirlooms, family pictures, art, important documents, and human remains, and the list goes on. If you can imagine it, Canada Post delivers it. Having door-to-door mail delivery is the only way to protect what we ship through Canada Post. It must also be noted that Canada Post handles not just Canadian mail but mail from all over the world, a world that believes we still protect its mail, which really isn't true today.
CUPW has been talking about expanding our services for decades, and management of Canada Post seems to want the exact opposite. Canada Post is set up to be able to deliver so much more to Canadians as a public service, but it seems only to want to destroy what is the only service in our country that can deliver to the last mile. We should be proud, but it's very difficult to be proud of this poorly run public service.
Can you imagine getting ready for your job in the morning, knowing your day consists of 25-plus kilometres of walking, carrying up to 35 pounds of mail on your back, having more than 1,000 customers to deliver to, and getting to do this every day? You also might not get home until 8 p.m. and miss your family mealtimes or your children's homework. Canada Post may force you out on overtime as well. If you can't physically get your work done, because it's impossible, you're now open to disciplinary procedures to add to your already miserable existence at Canada Post as their employee.
Canada Post in small-town Canada is the cornerstone of these places. People still gather at small community post offices to mingle, get the daily information, pick up their mail, and do their own mailing business. However, our new Canada Post will be in the drugstore or pharmacy where you go to pick up your mail products, as we see with the many postal outlets Canada Post is opening across the country. I go to a pharmacy for my medications, not a post office, and the same should be said for our mail.
We now have mail, usually parcels, that comes back to post offices because it can't be delivered for one reason or another, and customers cannot pick that mail up at the post office. They need to wait until a postal clerk scans it from the post office to the postal outlet, and then a truck comes and picks up the mail that is at the post office and takes it over to the postal outlet across the street, where now the customers can come pick it up. It makes no business sense whatsoever.
Thanks for listening.