Thank you for this opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
My presentation will focus on the five basic themes seen in my submission.
In his 1989 book, Home Game, the celebrated goalie Ken Dryden writes eloquently and passionately about the game of hockey and its significance as a cultural icon to Canadians. He is especially astute when he recounts the importance of the local arena to so many towns and cities, large and small, across the country, and especially here in the west.
Hockey has spurred the building of community centres. Sadly, the disappearance of the local arena has often been the final death knell of many struggling communities. Our communities tell us about who we are and help to bind us together in good times and bad.
Canada is a northern country faced with the twin challenges of vast geography and sparse population. When those challenges are combined with a hostile climate, people become acutely aware of their need to co-operate and make decisions for the common good.
Political theory generally acknowledges that the provision of public services is a necessary function of most governments. Canada's unique challenges make the provision of such services even more critically important to the survival of its citizens. With its universal obligations, Canada Post, or what used to be called the post office, is one such critically important public service.
When I visit small towns like High River, Hanna, Yorkton, or Nelson, the presence and visibility of the public post office, with its flag and its familiar signage, reminds me that we are all Canadians with mutual obligations to each other, and that we need a truly national and universal postal service. It is one of the ties that bind and a critical thread in the fabric of all communities. The disappearance of public postal outlets from our communities pulls at that thread, and our communities start to unravel just as surely as when the local arena burns down and community leaders must struggle to maintain the services and programs that citizens expect.
One might suggest that with the availability of the Internet, the need for postal services has been rendered moot. It is quite the contrary. The Internet has promoted personal isolation, and social media has encouraged a deterioration in civil discourse. We need fewer Kim Kardashians and more community leaders. We need greater public access to communications services. The Shaw and Rogers families are rich enough. We need the public postal service to expand and to prosper, for the benefit of all Canadians.
As already alluded to, public services are a critical part of the social fabric of any community. In Alberta, we have seen the effect of government policies that starve public services of the resources they need. For ideological reasons only, our health care and education systems have been starved of the financial resources necessary to allow them to thrive.
In the nineties, we saw large-scale layoffs of nurses and teachers and a move toward privatizing other related services. These actions led to widespread dissatisfaction with the public systems, which found themselves unable to meet public expectations with the diminished resources allowed. This in turn created a significant rise in the demand for private services to replace those that were not being adequately provided by the public systems.
Our post office seems to have suffered a similar fate. Canada Post management has reduced or eliminated services in smaller communities, contracted out many other services, and reduced service standards and pickup and delivery times without consultation with the public it supposedly serves.
This, I would argue, has engendered increasing public dissatisfaction with the public postal service, thus encouraging more private competition. This competition has further eroded the ability of Canada Post to generate the revenues necessary to continue to provide, let alone expand, the public service for which it is obligated.
Moreover, Canada Post management has steadfastly refused to discuss or implement measures that would enable it to generate the revenue that would allow it to improve basic services. Postal banking comes to mind. In fact, I know that the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia have profitable postal banking services.
Before I close, I would like to address what I believe to be one of the strangest examples of pretzel logic I have ever encountered.
Canada Post management has been warning Canadians for years that there has been a sharp reduction in the volume of first-class letter mail processed by Canada Post. Yet I'm given to understand that they have also invested billions of dollars in retrofitting their mail processing facilities with equipment designed to speed up the processing of first-class letter mail.
Where I come from, if a manager invests money to handle a product for which the public has little interest, that manager gets fired. Imagine if Canada Post had invested those billions into expanding their door-to-door services instead. Canadians would enjoy better and more reliable service. In turn, public confidence would be restored, and growth in the demand for the services of the public postal service would be expected. Canada Post revenues and profits would grow.
Canadians would no longer be at the mercy of private couriers to fill in the gap, which Canada Post has too long allowed to exist and to grow. I urge you to recommend to the government that it take whatever measures necessary to restore and further expand the public postal service, which all Canadians deserve.
Thank you for your time.