That's a good point to bring up. You said it is a service, but it is a service mandated to cover itself, and that's what we're running into. When we see reports, one of them shows, as my colleague mentioned, a loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars in the next nine years. Another report says that's a very conservative loss and it could be $1 billion. We're faced with the question of whether we pay higher taxes, do we take $1 billion from health care services to cover that, or do we make changes? That is why we're doing this. You brought some very good things up.
Mr. Bélanger, you talked about your trip to France. We actually have it very similar in Alberta where a lot of the government services are done through that. You can get your driver's licence, health care, everything, but it's been done through a mass privatized system, so these stores are within blocks of each other. There are more of them than there are liquor stores, and they provide services 7 a.m. to midnight. It's quite fascinating.
One of the things that we've seen with the growth in a lot of our communities, Edmonton being one, is adding 100,000 or 200,000 people to a region. It's grown so vastly that what used to be a rural post office is now inside a big city. Canada Post has about 500 of them that are rural but inside a big city. They've moved a lot of these mailboxes to pharmacies, as you mentioned.
Would you consider that being a viable solution? Should we transition these into pharmacies, etc., and use the money saved so that we can continue serving the true rural post offices? Basically, the money saved would be used to subsidize or continue with the good services in the true rural areas.