Thank you very much for pronouncing my name correctly. I appreciate that.
My name is Dave Sauer. I'm the president of the Winnipeg Labour Council. We're a union federation, a small council. We represent about 45,000 workers here in the City of Winnipeg, from 65 affiliated union locals. We've been around since 1894. We have a very long history in this city. A lot of our movement and our membership stems out of the history of North End, Winnipeg. It's a very historical area of Winnipeg. We had a general strike in 1919, and the bulk of the participants in that strike were residents of Winnipeg's North End. It's historically an immigrant community, and now it is largely an indigenous population that occupies the North End.
One of the reasons we have formed, I guess, if you go back to our history in 1894, has to do with alleviating poverty. One of the biggest things that we've always said is that if you want to alleviate poverty in Canada, you need to get a union card in everyone's pocket, because, on average, everybody makes about $5 an hour more. There needs to be a method, however, for having that money stay in their pockets.
In light of that, we are here to speak forcefully, at least as best we can, about convincing people and members of the committee that Canada Post should get into postal banking.
We have a very large poverty issue here in Winnipeg. We find that in the North End especially there is an extensive amount of poverty coming out of the idea that people don't have a proper way to bank. They have to pay 600% interest to payday lenders—predatory lenders, as I like to call them—pawn shops, and so forth. We want Canada Post to get involved in postal banking because we think this can help alleviate poverty in the North End by putting more money in people's pockets.
There are a lot of different examples we can cite from across the globe. In New Zealand, they have the Kiwibank, which generated 81% profits for New Zealand Post, after tax. PostFinance in Switzerland accounts for 48% of Swiss Post's operating profits. In Italy, BancoPosta profits allowed the Italian post office to make 55 million euros in profits, or $86.1 million Canadian. In spite of the losses incurred by its postal business, in France, La Banque Postale had operating profits of 842 million euros. I won't go into that conversion. It's a little complicated, but it seems like it works.
In a country like Canada, where we have more and more banks exiting a lot of areas of the country where they don't find enough profitability, this is where the payday lenders come in. We think Canada Post can play a pivotal role in this country in helping to keep predatory lenders at bay.
There are over 6,000 postal outlets in Canada. If you take a look at those numbers, we have some options here on the table. It can be a dynamic shift in Canada Post's operations. It's something they already did. We had the Canada Post Savings Bank, which unfortunately stopped operations in 1969. It's something we already have experience with. We can enhance it. We can make sure that we don't have to deal with these predatory lenders any longer.
I keep harping on that over and over again because it's something we're very familiar with at the Labour Council. We work very closely with the United Way of Winnipeg, which does a lot of inner city work here. It's unfortunate that you see this happening, that we don't have any kind of system in place to make sure people have a better option than dealing with big banks that don't live or work in their area.
For us, it's all about alleviating poverty. I want to hammer that message home over and over as much as I possibly can to everybody here. Postal banking works in other countries.
There are some options we could do. I heard some of the previous presenters talking about where they'd like to run a few test cases. I have three really good options. As diverse as Canada is, you could do an urban setting, a rural setting, and a northern setting. These are three very good test markets.
In closing, I want to emphasize that postal banking is the future of Canada Post.
Thank you.