I'd like to thank the committee chair and honourable members for giving us this opportunity to speak.
I'd like to thank Penny for starting.
I come to you as a small-business person, I would even say a micro-business person. I'm also a graduate student at the University of Prince Edward Island, and I am studying youth and rural issues. As a small-business person and as someone who has academic interests in this area, I am really happy to be able to speak to you today.
I am part of a group of people who have small businesses on the Island, and the group called the Etsy Artisans of PEI, and Etsy, as you might have heard, is an online company that facilitates artisans, makers, and craftspeople selling their wares online. I am part of that group.
The group on P.E.I. has about a hundred members spread across the island. It's predominantly young people, women, and people living in rural communities, and for the most part, we rely on Canada Post to send our parcels. A lot of us don't have a brick-and-mortar presence on the island, so we rely solely on purchases from elsewhere, and through that, we rely on Canada Post.
It's an important service for a lot of us, and we see it as a public service. We don't necessarily see it as something that needs to be run completely as a private sector business. We tend to see it as something like a ferry service or as infrastructure. It's important for us to be able to market our products, and we see this as something that is as integral as health care or transportation.
Speaking to you as a graduate student studying rural and youth issues, services like this to people who want to live in a remote or rural area and start a business are of the utmost importance, and access to services in an equal and equitable way I see as being crucial for rural development and for youth retention on the island.
I really don't have much more to say, but I do believe that postal services like Canada Post are important for a rural place, and they're important for our island because we obviously have few connections to the mainland, and postal service is one of them.
I implore you to consider the impact of all the changes that are outlined in the discussion paper for young people, for rural businesses, and for small businesses and micro-businesses on the island.
Thank you.