Thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I'm here as a social scientist with expertise on the public sector.
I put my name forward as a witness because I believe the discussion paper of the task force for the Canada Post Corporation review is fundamentally flawed. Parliament and residents of Canada more broadly are ill served by this discussion paper. The task force missed the opportunity to offer an innovative strategic vision for Canada Post that takes advantage of its existing unique strengths as a crown corporation to orient it for a future in which it would respond creatively to trends in postal service use and make a meaningful contribution to society's necessary transition from relying on fossil fuels to generating energy in ways that do not make the climate change crisis worse.
The Delivering Community Power plan, developed by a number of organizations, offers such a vision. Unfortunately, the task force did not treat its proposals with the seriousness they deserve. Instead, it produced a report that is blatantly slanted in favour of an all-too-predictable approach for Canada Post, one that would see it increasingly operate like a conventional private firm in a way that would facilitate at least its partial privatization in the future.
It appears to me that the reason for this is the composition of the task force. None of its members have expertise in fields relevant to the future of the public sector in an era of worsening climate change. Three of its four members are business figures. As a result, the report is a missed opportunity, and it should not serve as the basis for changes to Canada Post.
I'd like to focus on specifically three of the many specific ways in which the discussion paper is flawed.
First, as part of its rejection of the reintroduction of postal banking, it makes the claim that “most Canadians now prefer to bank online”. What is its support for this claim? It cites “research conducted by Yahoo Canada”, which claims that 68% of Canadians now bank online on a weekly basis. Checking the source cited in the relevant footnote, one finds an infographic reporting on a so-called consumer finance study conducted by Yahoo. It appears that the study was done by surveying the readers of Yahoo Finance.
As social science, this is laughable. In fact, if one of my students handed in something like this, I would fail them. The readers of Yahoo Finance are in no way representative of the population of Canada. The source cited does not in fact provide reliable information about what proportion of Canadians bank online, and it certainly does not tell us what proportion prefer to bank online. Some people may bank online not because they prefer to do so but because they are obliged to, either because they don't have time to get to a branch of their financial institution or because there's no branch near them. This looks to me like using so-called research to bolster a preconception—namely, that postal banking should be rejected.
More broadly, the report's discussion of postal banking reads like a brief from the bank lobby, not an objective assessment of postal banking as an option. The report makes no reference to Canada Post's internal report entitled “Banking: A Proven Diversification Strategy”. Although Canada Post's research on postal banking was stopped under the previous Conservative government and the public was denied access to most of this multi-year study, which was released following an access to information request in a mostly redacted form, we do know that the study states that postal banking would be a “win-win” money-maker. We have to ask why the study, whose existence was made known in 2014, was not consulted.
Third and finally, the report favours the creation of a new regulatory body for Canada Post—or, in its words, the addition of postal regulatory bodies “to an existing regulator”—with a wide range of powers. The tasks suggested for such a body, including changing the universal service obligation and updating the rural moratorium, make it clear that it would be an instrument for changing Canada Post in ways that reduce service to the public and make Canada Post operate even more like a private firm.
The balance between the public interest and competitive market forces, clearly implied by the report, would be tilted heavily in favour of the latter at the expense of services to residents of Canada and the workers who deliver those services. In other words, the proposed regulatory body would be a Trojan Horse for the agenda of remaking Canada Post in a way that would benefit private firms that operate or would like to operate in its sector.
Empowering a regulatory body to make major changes would reduce parliamentary oversight of Canada Post, further weakening the influence of the public interest in how Canada Post operates. The report proposes allowing the regulatory body to amend the Canadian Postal Service Charter instead of requiring the government to do so. This would allow the government to avoid responsibility and accountability for changes to the public postal service. Although that might be convenient for the federal government of the day, it would be anti-democratic to do so.
For these reasons, I believe the task force's proposal for a new regulatory body for Canada Post should be rejected.
Thank you.