Government Operations Committee on Oct. 18th, 2016

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

I talked about the rural-urban divide—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Sorry, just very quickly.... I've lived across the entire country, and our system is really remarkable, compared with other places, when you are trying to get a lot of these services. I hate to see that taken away.

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

I don't believe I said “take it away”. If you go to rural Alberta, you will find many small communities that don't have a registry down the road. They don't have many of those services you take for granted here.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Would you recommend, then, just to keep it for the rural areas?

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

What I have suggested is a platform. The platform will be a list of services. In our scenario, you would partner with the provinces and the municipalities, and they would say to you, “This is what we want to build.” It's like anything else. It's your shopping cart. We need this, this, and this.

Some rural communities will tell you they need a registry service, desperately. They will tell you they would like that business centre room, because they could use telemedicine. It's happening. It's going to happen even more. They would tell you that.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Great. I really appreciate that. You've hit on a great thing about the rural-suburban divide. We are hearing that these postal services are a lot more important in certain areas than downtown, where we have them every five feet in a Shoppers Drug Mart, etc.

One thing that has come up is that there are about 500 post offices in areas that used to be rural but are now part of the big city: West Edmonton, Spruce Grove, etc. Even St. Albert, as we heard this morning, is now part of a huge city. What do you think of the idea of moving those over to a commercial setting and using the money saved there to help subsidize and support the much more needed ones in rural areas?

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

First of all, I think you should keep your infrastructure. That's what I am saying. Keep your infrastructure in place. Maybe change what they have to offer. You can make them more targeted to the needs of the community. To close them means you start to dismantle your infrastructure. Where does that stop? What I'm saying is, have the conversation with them to discuss the possibilities. Keep at least some basic infrastructure in place, and then move on from there.

If you start to dismantle your infrastructure—I've seen it happen, and I'm sure many of you around the table have seen it happen—it erodes continuously, until all of a sudden you are asking the question, is it worthwhile to even keep it?

I am encouraging you to keep it and to consider the possibilities. You will get that only when you actually consult with the communities and the provinces about the shopping cart. As Councillor Nickel said, your opportunities change for what that community needs. Edmonton needs something totally different.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We are out of time, unfortunately. Thank you very much.

Ms. Duncan, you have seven minutes, please.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all three of you for coming all the way out here—apologies that you had to leave Edmonton to come here. These sessions should happen in Edmonton, St. Albert, and so forth. That's my personal opinion.

Something that really bothers me is the language of this review. Why should Canada Post be profitable? It is not a private corporation; it is a crown corporation. Its legislative mandate is to provide a public service. I appreciate your testimony and a lot of the testimony of the others. We need to go back to what the legislative mandate is. Either the decision is made to privatize it, or it is going to remain a crown corporation delivering.

The advantage of the fact that it is a crown corporation and not just a government department, legislatively—it could be looked into—is that it has the potential to enter into MOUs and contracts for services with other entities, such as municipalities, medical practices, law practices, passport offices, and so forth.

I really value what you have all provided. Particularly to have a small law practice.... People who are in business can pass on the costs, but a senior or an ordinary family member can't pass on those costs when it's across the board.

I would put a question to you, and Ms. Kronewitt-Martin, you might want to speak to this. One of the proposals was to get rid of the uniform rate of postage. What would that do to someone in an isolated community? Is it fair that they would have to pay more because they happen to live in an isolated community in Nunavut?

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

Once again you're increasing that rural-urban divide and I think it will cause us great problems in the long term. That's a very narrow focus, and when I talk about thinking integratively, that's what I'm talking about. You actually look at all the chessboard, not only the three squares in front of you. I see that as looking at the three squares in front of you, and you're not looking at the entire chessboard.

Right now Canada Post delivers medications to people in the north. What would that do to them if all of a sudden that was an increased cost?

I disagree with that completely because I don't think that is the solution. I think that's actually part of the problem.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

It's sounding like at least the two of you are suggesting that we need to be not just looking at a review of how we do postal delivery; we also need to be looking at service delivery for federal programs.

As members of Parliament, our constituency office serves people who have problems with Revenue Canada or with pensions. People don't even know they have a right to a pension. We also heard from a retired member of Canada Post that they do all kinds of things that are not even in their contract, but that we just take for granted.

I'm encouraged by what all of you are saying about the opportunity. We should be looking at the opportunities to make sure we cover the costs because by law it's supposed to be self-sustaining, not profitable, not profit-making. Yes, we're raising the fees for Parks Canada, but we don't expect Parks Canada to be profitable.

I'm wondering if you could speak to that and give us a few more ideas of opportunities that could be pursued in this review. In fact, if you've had an opportunity to see the report by the task force, they actually report that about 94% of Canadians and businesses value Canada Post and think it's important. It sounds like the challenge we have is how you continue that service, but outside the box. That's why I like what you're saying.

Mr. Newell.

[Hugh Newell]

It's important that Canada Post maintain the infrastructure because that infrastructure is what gives it an advantage in distributing materials across the country. The minute that infrastructure is dismantled, the opportunity is gone and it will never come back again.

I think a lot of opportunities have been missed. I don't think that Canada Post needs to make a profit. You talk about it losing a billion dollars by 2026. That's speculation, absolute speculation. We can't accept that as the figure we're working with today. What we have to look at is how we can prevent that figure from coming about.

What business could Canada Post pick up? It is a service, but it is also a business because it's taking money to provide that service. That's where the expansion has to come, in my mind. You don't cut out the service. In bad times businesses don't stop advertising; that puts them out of business immediately. In bad times you don't withdraw all your services. You're no longer in business. It has to be expanded. We can't be playing Chicken Little, and the sky is falling. Let's find a way to resolve this. Let's find a way to keep this because it is an important service. I don't think I've answered your question.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

No. That's excellent. Thank you.

Any of the others?

[Eric Oddleifson]

I came this morning with not a whole bunch of ideas in my head. I learned about this about four days ago. I did a little bit of reading on the website. There was one paper that was a hundred and some pages. I didn't read that one.

Having said that, and thinking as we are today, again, I present myself as a businessman. I use couriers a lot. We have daily couriers who take our work to the courthouse and to the land titles office. I use Purolator a lot. I don't use the others necessarily because Purolator works for me, but they come and pick up.

If I want to use Canada Post, are they going to come and pick up from my office? They haven't presented that service yet. They could look at how they could be better couriers. How could they be better couriers? That is a big chunk of my business, and it's daily.

As a lawyer, one of the things I have to do is to send money to other lawyers, sometimes five, six, or seven times a day, and every one of those goes by courier. That would be one thing. That would be competing with the private sector, but that's a lot of money that goes out of my office to service providers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Oddleifson, you may not know this but you would be interested to know that Canada Post has approximately a 92% ownership in Purolator.

[Eric Oddleifson]

Good. That's who I use.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Whalen, it's over to you for seven minutes, please.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Hi. Thank you very much for coming today.

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

We've talked a bit about some of the different pricing models associated with the service Canada Post provides, and there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about how parcels are priced versus how letter mail is priced. If I told you that parcels were priced on the market, and distance is going to increase your prices—it's not like the letter mail—then does that affect your view on some of the answers you gave to Ms. Duncan's question about it being more or less expensive to deliver mail? Are you asking that we change the model on parcels and make parcels like letter mail?

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

It's a good question. I understand the need for that, but I guess what I'd caution about is that maybe you need a sliding scale. Maybe it's a case where if it's in the far north, where that becomes prohibitive, then you have to be aware of that because you're decreasing your service level and you're increasing your rural divide. I'm suggesting to you that maybe there's a sliding scale and that you acknowledge you subsidize some distant communities more.

I'm hearing it all the time, and if you think back to the comments made about living in the far north and the difficulties presented, then we need to start to address that. Otherwise, it's going—

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you. The task force talked a bit about introducing a regulator. A regulator, as a possibility, could leverage some type of a levy on other types of courier services to subsidize other types of services. That would also open up the possibility for more private competition in all of the markets.

Mr. Newell, how would you feel about that type of an approach to subsidizing rural versus urban?

[Hugh Newell]

I wouldn't have any problem with that at all. I think that this is a big country and there are people who live in places where it's a disadvantage. We have to work together to be able to resolve those issues.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Oddleifson.

[Eric Oddleifson]

I have no comment on that one.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Okay.

Ms. Martin.

[Debby Kronewitt-Martin]

I think, as I said, we have to have the “and” conversation and look at the possibilities, but we have to understand the impacts of them.