Yes, and I realize that my answer is going to sound self-serving, so I'll just disclose that right away.
I was asked to testify in 2016 before the blue ribbon panel set up by the then newly elected Trudeau government. They appointed a blue ribbon panel; it's been well published. Everybody knows that panel. I went before it, and I had just published the year before my 2015 Macdonald-Laurier Institute report, with all the data on the losses and declines and so forth.
I had in there the radical surgery that I recommended, which was franchising all post offices, ending delivery five days a week and ending home delivery to the 25% of Canadians who are privileged to get home delivery. For full disclosure before anyone attacks me, yes, I'm one of those people. I shouldn't be getting home delivery to my door, but I do, although there are no letters coming anyway, so it doesn't matter.
To your question, I put some very precise recommendations in that report. I was there testifying for probably three hours, and they rejected the advice, the very concrete recommendations. Then I disclosed them in the media, in questions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm absolutely certain the then prime minister and Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible, rejected it, as did CUPW, as did the management of Canada Post. I'm not trying to point the finger at one person. Everybody said, “No, no, no.”
I think their basic argument was this, very quickly: Yes, the letters are declining very precipitously, but it's come to an end. It's going to plateau, and the problem is going to be okay, because we're going to stabilize it at lower than 5.5 billion letters, but it's not going to be that bad.
My response was that there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the decline had plateaued. Any one of you can look at the decline, and every year it goes down by 6% to 8% to 9% in the pieces of letter mail delivered. It's not because of something I'm doing. It's what Negroponte pointed out, that the economics of digitization just overwhelm the physical distribution of letters and mail.