Evidence of meeting #44 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was community.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
One of the suggestions was to have a community hub. Do you see that as being a useful way for postal services to operate in rural Canada?
As an Individual
The model is interesting, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that community hubs of those kinds would meet the service obligations of postal workers.
Former President, Local 710, Canadian Union of Postal Workers
One thing we all have to keep in mind is that Canada Post has been around for about 150 years providing a service and doing all these kinds of things including postal banking; none of this is new.
I think all of you who have been on the committee for a while know that we did have a postal bank in Canada. Am I right? Okay. I'm not going to go down that road again.
The idea of having one post office, having all these things, and then smaller ones around, in theory would be a good start. There's no issue there. We're all in favour of trying it to see if it works, and if that's what it takes—
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
Excuse me. You have had some experience as well with operating the retail side of—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
You only have about a minute left, Madam Shanahan, in case you want Mr. Rosendorff to comment.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
That's very good.
Just to finish with that, do you see the expansion of retail services as being viable?
Former President, Local 710, Canadian Union of Postal Workers
Yes. It would be very viable.
Vice-President, Business Development, CapieKonsult
I think we need to redefine the distance that you need to live from a post office. To come to your point of community hubs, post offices could possibly be in bigger rural towns, at the library, or somewhere as part of the community centre, not in a stand-alone place.
Liberal
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Panellists, thank you very much for your attendance here today. If you have additional information that you wish to bring to the attention of this committee, you could certainly submit it to our clerk, probably in the next 10 days to two weeks at the latest. We will be tabling a report in Parliament, probably by the end of November or very early December at the latest.
We will suspend for a few moments, while we await the arrival of our next panellists.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you all for being here this afternoon.
I know, Madame Brousseau and Mr. Opstad, you have been patiently waiting in the audience, listening to all of the proceedings. I'm glad we were able to accommodate you.
Mr. Goldie, I'm not sure if you've had a chance to witness some of the proceedings in which witnesses have testified before you. Quite simply it's a very easy process, a very simple process. We're going to ask each of you to give a five-minute opening address, followed by a series of questions from all of our committee members.
Madame Brousseau, I know that your presentation is about 24 pages long. That was probably made for a more formal setting than this. Trust me, though, that through the question-and-answer process we'll get to most of the presentation that you might have missed in your opening statement.
With that, we will start with Madame Brousseau.
Michelle Brousseau Director, Alberta/Northwest Territories/Nunavut, Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association
Hi. I'm the postmaster in the village of Veteran, Alberta. It's located one and a half hours east of Stettler, an hour west of the Saskatchewan border. Today I'm representing the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association, known as CPAA-ACMPA. CPAA is the second-largest bargaining unit under the Canada Post umbrella, representing members that staff the post offices in towns and villages of rural Canada. CPAA members, consisting of 95% women, operate 3,260 post offices in rural Canada. We are in touch with over six million rural customers on a regular basis. Most often we are the only federal presence in the community, and we are the hub of the community.
Full-time assistants work 40 hours per week, and part-time assistants work from four to 40 hours per week. The post offices these employees work in are classified as grade offices, of which there are six classifications. Many who are scheduled to work 20 hours or less per week often have their hours scheduled over five or six days. Unlike urban retail operations, part-time assistants often remain in their jobs for years before progressing to positions with a greater number of hours.
For the village of Consort, the mail truck might come in at 10:30 in the morning, so they have a part-timer come in from 10:30 to 1:00. That way it covers the lunch-hour shift for the postmaster to go for lunch. So during that time, where do you find a job in the morning to cover until 10:30? You need a job, and we're in a rural area where there are not that many jobs.
That's it for me.
Conservative
Jacquie Strong Director, Alberta/Northwest Territories/Nunavut, Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association
I can do that. Thank you very much.
Term employees are hired for only a particular length of time and are not appointed to an indeterminate or full-time, position. They're not allotted a certain number of hours weekly. Their employment is often precarious. A lot of our employees are on call, so they can go for days without any hours.
In my office, our parcels have quadrupled. Online shopping is starting to fill the financial gap resulting from the decline of letter mail. With the growth of online shopping, it is more essential than ever to have a post office to deliver parcels to Canadians. We get cat litter, dog food, diapers, and laundry soap. We have so many things coming into the post office in rural areas, because the people have too far to go to shop. It takes too long to go purchase stuff, and it takes planning, so they're ordering an awful lot of items online and they come through the post office. That's why our volume has increased significantly.
I have a lot of at-home moms in my area, and they love the shopping—clothing, books and supplies for the schools. There are a lot of educational materials. Many people take online courses from Athabasca University, so books are constantly coming in. There are also a lot of things for home schooling, and a lot of Amazon books. We have such a high volume of parcels, and we're loving it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Mr. Opstad, you have five minutes. The floor is yours, sir.
George Opstad As an Individual
I've been a letter carrier for 27 years. I wanted to speak today because about 10 years ago we had these cases that we sorted our mail into, and every time I got on to a new case, I found that it maybe wasn't laid out that well. So the first thing I would do was to take sheets of paper and write down exactly where I wanted each one of the addresses to go. Then they would send that off to a guy, and that guy would basically put them on there by hand.
After I did quite a few of these cases, I decided that somebody should write a program so that I wouldn't have to keep explaining to the guy how to set up one of these cases, so I started writing this program. After a few years, I got it to the point where it was more or less working.
At the time, maybe about every four years, they would change all the walks, and then you'd get a new case and you would have the new strips in there. It's called a volume count. Then within six months of a volume count, they'd change all the cases.
They announced that they were going to have this volume count, so basically I knew I had about six months to get it to the point where it could more or less work, so I talked to my then superintendent. His name was Bill Swan. I said, “I'd like you to look at this program I have.” He said, “Okay. Next week we'll take a look at it.” The next week, he said, “Something came up and we can't look at it.”
I kept trying to show it to him and then finally a guy came to my place around Christmas, about two months later. He was a supervisor, so I showed it to him. Then I gave him an example on one of my memory sticks and I walked him through it. He asked me to give him the memory stick and he took it to work. I went in and asked him what they said, and he said he had given it to collection and delivery. I knew something was up, and I asked him if I could get my memory stick back. He went into his desk and gave it back to me. So nothing was given to them.
Employees can go onto a separate website called Intrapost. It's just for employees. They had a section on there that was called “Ask Moya”. That was our CEO at the time, Moya Greene. I explained the situation to her and said, “I'd like somebody to look at this program”, so she set up a meeting. I brought my computer in. It's a desktop, so it took a bit.... I set it up, and the meeting lasted about two minutes. They didn't even want to look at it.
Then we had our changeover and they gave us our new strips, but now they had made a program to do them. They were worse than they were before. Then I sent an email to our new CEO. His name was Stewart Bacon. He said, “We're going to look at it again.”
The meeting was set up. I was in Edmonton; they were in Ottawa. There was a program called NetMeeting. I could bring up the program on my screen and they'd have exactly the same screen in Ottawa. I was walking them through it, telling them what it did, and they were in Ottawa and were asking me questions. They said, “Where does it get this information from?”, and I said, “I have it in a table.” I explained it to them and they asked me to show it to them, so I did.
At the beginning it seemed to be going really well because they were saying, “It's nice the way it does that.” Then at the end, they were starting to groan, and I wondered why. I found out that the people who were looking at my program were in fact the same people who were writing a program for Canada Post. I was, effectively, the competition, so they didn't want anything to do with me.
I complained. I said, “It's not really fair that my program was evaluated by the same people writing the program for Canada Post”, because they basically said, “Your program won't work.” I got a guy from Canada Post to try to investigate. He didn't want anything to do with me.
I wrote a letter to Judy Foote about six months ago. I kept phoning her office and saying, “Am I going to get a reply for my thing?” The response was, “You'll get a reply.”
Is that time?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Unfortunately, yes. I personally found your story very interesting. Hopefully during the questions, we'll get a little bit more information as to the end result of your phone calls.
Mr. Goldie, you're up for five minutes, please.
Frank Goldie As an Individual
Thank you very much.
My name is Frank Goldie. I was a letter carrier for 38 years. I started at the post office when I was 16 years old and I just recently retired at 55. I've seen a lot of changes happen—some good, some bad.
We're here today to talk about how the post office is changing. My mother worked for the post office for 20 years. My wife still works for the post office. She's been there for 10 years. I have a young son who has been a letter carrier for six years. The post office has been very good to us. It's put a roof over our heads. We're all paying taxes. We live in our houses. I have very few bad things to say about the post office.
However, until recently in our postal code, T2A, we did have door-to-door delivery. We now have a mailbox outside. It's actually right in front of the playground. It's right in front of the playground zone. It's certainly not a place to go to meet your neighbour. There's nothing but garbage around there.
I can speak for myself when I say that the letter carrier does come to the door every day and sees everything. I knew everyone's name. If someone had a crack in their basement window, I would see it before they did. These people are a part of the community. They're uniformed. They're polite. They're professional and they get the job done. They talk to people. They talk to people who are lonely. They help people.
I have a terrific record with Canada Post. I have no black marks, but there are no marks on there that say I've helped somebody every day either. I'm saying this only because you have to know that these young men and women and these old men and women are out there helping the public.
As far as rural goes, we have such a different country. This is the second-biggest country on the planet, next to Russia. There has to be some give-and-take with rural people. Not only are they isolated out there, it's just pure isolation. If you take away these installations.... This is where these people go; they meet; they have coffee. It gives them a reason to come into town. If you take away this grain elevator, I don't know what's going to happen. If they thought they were isolated before in these rural areas, when that Canadian flag pulls down for the last time, they will really be isolated.
I'll change the subject for a second to the Canada Post brand. There are few brands out there that are really established. You can have your IBM, but it takes decades. It can take a century to create a great brand. If you stop or slow down this service to three days a week, you are minimizing that brand to a third-class service.
Trust me: I talk to my son every day; I talk to my wife every day. These people are working hard. These new people under the last collective agreement are not making $25 an hour; they're making $19 an hour and it's all grandfathered in, so anybody now is making $19 an hour when they start. I'm not sure about you, but I don't think those are terrific wages.
I thank you very much for your time.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much, Mr. Goldie.
Thank you all.
We'll start with our line of questioning now. Ms. Shanahan, go ahead for seven minutes, please.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to each and every one of you for your service to your fellow Canadians and to the country. I'm hearing about a sense of service and a sense of duty over and above what people would typically think that a postal worker is doing, so thank you very much for that.
I want to start with Ms. Brousseau and Ms. Strong.
What I was hearing at first was that there wasn't enough work for the postal workers who were there, but then I was hearing about the parcel delivery being quadrupled. Indeed, that is very welcome business. I would like you to expand on that, and to expand maybe on some of the other services that a rural outlet could be offering that would be viable.