Transport Committee on March 26th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

That's all the time we have. That's seven minutes.

Mr. Dewar.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the guests today.

Many of my questions have been answered, but I just want to make a couple of comments or observations. From the industry, there's no disputing what's happened? I mean, you might disagree, but it's fairly clear as far as the interpretation of the courts goes. Is that correct?

[Evan Zelikovitz]

The courts have spoken. In September 2005, the Ontario Court of Appeal said yes, this is the exclusive privilege. It actually wasn't coincidental that we began advocating with government just before an election. On December 22, 2005, the Supreme Court denied leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, at which time we didn't, coincidentally, but we decided it was in the best interests of our entire industry to do that. But yes, you're correct.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

No, my question was simply about your concurrence on that. Okay, thank you.

Another observation I have regards a response from the minister, in a letter that I have quoted here:

The activities of international remailers cost Canada Post millions of dollars each year and erodes the Corporation's ability to maintain a healthy national postal service and provide universal service to all Canadians.

I think that's where I'm coming from as a representative. You're doing your job. You've got an industry that you're representing. Quite frankly, some might call this a loophole that just wasn't known and noted. The courts have decided that you have a minister who is responding, and it's hard to take issue with the fact that his observation and responsibility as a minister are that this is going to erode the corporation's ability to maintain healthy national postal service. So I appreciate your point of view and what you do. You're there to represent the industry. If I were you, I'd be doing the same thing.

Our responsibility here is to protect service to Canadians. So when Ms. Bourque points out that this is going to erode rural mail service, I think that's the connective tissue, the dots here. Eroding the fiscal capacity of a corporation is like having someone come in and carve out some money from your members. You might be concerned about that. That's really what I see happening here.

Ms. Bourque, is your concern the connection between industry and the rural mail service? The minister has stated here in the letter dated July 25, 2006, that this will erode Canada Post's ability fiscally.

[Deborah Bourque]

Yes, absolutely. Canada Post has a monopoly on first-class letter mail, and with that monopoly comes the universal service obligation. Canada Post's competitors don't have an obligation to deliver mail at a uniform rate to every community in Canada and Quebec. Private competitors don't have the monopoly; they don't have the universal service obligation, and that's our real concern. By undermining the exclusive privilege, you undermine Canada Post's ability to use its revenues that it makes in urban centres to subsidize service to rural communities.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I guess my follow-up question to that, to the industry representatives, is this. Are you asking, then, that this arrangement that the courts have essentially decided upon be changed? Are you asking that this be changed so that it accommodates your members? Is that what you're looking for?

[Gwyneth Howell]

In a nutshell, yes. Basically what we're asking is to be allowed to continue to do what we have been doing for 20 years at apparently no detrimental effect to rural delivery--otherwise we would have heard about this years ago. Again, we've been doing this unobstructed, until the court cases started about five or six years ago.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I'm not suggesting it's the same, but we used to also have corporations that flew flags of convenience and had ways of parking their money elsewhere, and now we're plugging those holes. I think one could observe and say, notwithstanding that this existed as a practice, that doesn't necessarily make it a practice that should be left to carry on, if you know what I mean.

[Gordon Taschuk, General Manager, Kirk Integrated Marketing Services Ltd., Canadian International Mail Association]

Mr. Chairman, perhaps I could speak to that.

Canada Post has been profitable for at least the last ten to eleven years. It's difficult for me to understand how this has been going on for that period of time and now, all of a sudden, it's going to affect Canada Post's viability.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I just want to make a last point, Chair.

I think what the minister was saying, and certainly what others have mentioned, is that they are taking on a new initiative to make sure that rural service is there. And I guess I get the connection here.

So notwithstanding your point, we're also talking about a corporation that's trying to provide more service to Canadians. At the end of the day, that's what we're here to ensure, that Canadian citizens have service. In the case of rural citizens, they haven't. So the capacity of Canada Post, according to legislation in 1981, according to the courts, in my opinion, in this member's opinion, needs to be preserved.

You can appreciate why that would be, because you're now talking about extending the service. And if you're going to extend the service, as you would appreciate, you'll need more fiscal capacity to do that. So I guess that would be perhaps a response.

Thank you.

[Deborah Bourque]

Could I just add one small point to that? Canada Post has recently released figures that indicate that complying with the government's directive on rural mail delivery would cost around $500 million. And that's a lot of money, even for a profitable corporation like Canada Post.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Chong.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to direct my questions to Madame Bourque.

I have two broad areas I want to highlight. One is the whole issue around universal service in return for a monopoly over international remail and other monopolies that Canada Post has.

I would be more sympathetic to that argument if it were indeed the case that rural mail delivery were continuing in this country, but that's not the case. In my riding, as in dozens of other ridings, rural mail delivery is being discontinued. And replacing it with super mailboxes, in my view, does not constitute a continuation of that rural mail delivery.

My view is that a lot of these cases are ones where the tool being utilized, or the process by which the tool is being utilized, needs to be reassessed, because we have rural roads in the riding where there are literally 30 or 40 cars a day on gravel roads that have existed pre-Confederation where people who have been receiving their mail for close to or over 100 years are suddenly being told that their mailboxes are no longer safe. They are suddenly being told that they now have to drive six, seven, eight kilometres one way to pick up their mail. They are suddenly being told that while it is unsafe for a single postal employee to deliver mail to rural mailboxes, to 500 individual mailboxes, because of safety concerns, it is okay for 500 Canadians who are not at all trained in rural mail delivery to park their cars at the exact same points of pick-up on the road and pick up their mail from the super mailbox location.

So I have trouble accepting the argument that Canada Post needs to protect its monopoly over international remail if rural mail delivery is not being restored. It makes it incredibly difficult for me to be sympathetic to that argument.

The second thing I want to highlight, Chair, has to do with the actual issue around rural mail delivery. Your membership needs to know that if this trend continues, jobs are at risk, because, frankly speaking, delivering to 100 addresses at a super mailbox location requires substantially less time and effort than delivering to 100 mailboxes at the end of the lot line. With present trends, if all 840,000 rural mailboxes are going to be evaluated, and it looks like they are, the members on this committee need to know and the public needs to know that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of rural mailboxes that will cease to have delivery. We're talking about hundreds of mailboxes in rural ridings across this country, and that's going to have repercussions for your membership in terms of future planning by management of Canada Post Corporation. It's going to have repercussions on the service that rural Canadians expect.

In areas like mine, we don't have a military base. We don't have hundreds of government employees. We don't have large government offices. We don't, frankly, have anything in terms of significant federal presence except for rural mail delivery. It's the one service that residents in my area have come to rely on, and it is one that we hope both Canada Post and its employees and the union could work constructively on to ensure that it is restored. As the situation currently stands, it is not, and as a representative of the people in my area, I can tell you that they're quite upset.

[Deborah Bourque]

Can I respond?

I agree completely with everything you just said. We understand that jobs are at risk in terms of going from lot line delivery to community mailboxes. We also understand the implications for rural communities in terms of the loss of that lot line delivery, so we're on the same page. We're working really hard with Canada Post, and the objective of assessing those 843,000 rural mailboxes is not, in our view, to move that delivery to group mailboxes. Our objective is to maintain door-to-door or lot line delivery in rural communities. Rural Canadians expect that service, and it is one of the few federal presences in rural communities.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Chair, may I just quickly respond to that?

That's not what's happening. I'm not talking about routes that have become high-volume because of growth in the GTA that are being discontinued. I'm talking about rural routes, gravel roads, side roads, and concession roads, which see no more than 30 or 40 cars a day, roads where mothers are walking their dogs and their baby carriages because there is so little traffic. These are being deemed unsafe. Only a handful out of the 840,000 mailboxes in this country have been assessed. On the current trends, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of rural mailboxes that will be deemed to be unsafe and to be pulled out of existence. We're not talking about the occasional mailbox that's been poorly positioned on the side of a busy highway, or that is on a route that has a substantial increase in traffic. People need to know we are talking about the side road going through a bucolic pasture where there's very little traffic. These mailboxes on these routes are the ones that are being deemed unsafe.

So I don't accept the premise that rural mail delivery is rosy right now. Because if this is going to be assessed on all the remaining routes in this country, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of mailboxes that are going to be discontinued.

[Deborah Bourque]

I hope we're not, because Canada Post should now be using the proper tool. A third party has been engaged by Canada Post and they've developed a tool, a process for assessing the rural mailboxes, that we've agreed to. It's our view that those boxes that were assessed without the proper tool, that Canada Post needs to go back and re-assess those mailboxes and restore delivery. In some cases, it's simply a matter of moving the mailbox a few feet back from the road. But they need to work with the customer and they need to work with the local union reps to do that and decide what's safe.

There are two different kinds of unsafe conditions. One is the traffic and whether or not the car can pull sufficiently off the side of the road. There's also an ergonomic issue where the rural mail deliverer has to reach across the seat, from the driver's seat to put the mail out the passenger window into the mailbox. Depending on how many times a day you have to do that, it may or may not be dangerous.

Every time there's a complaint by one of our members under the Canada Labour Code, Labour Canada comes in and assesses the situation and decides whether or not it's a legitimate safety complaint. In the vast majority of the right to refusals, Labour Canada has come in and said it was unsafe. In some cases, the rulings have been a little too stringent, I think, in that they've said that all four wheels have to be so far off the side of the road. That may or may not be possible in some of those areas you're talking about.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Ms. Bourque, I'm going to have to stop you there and go to Monsieur Bélanger.

[Deborah Bourque]

Sorry. Okay, but we're on the same page here. We agree completely with restoring rural delivery exactly as you've articulated it.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Madam Howell, I just wanted to refer you to your statement in the second-last paragraph. You say,

To this end we respectfully urge this committee to exercise its authority to prepare a report and bring a motion before the House as quickly as possible, recommending “the expeditious introduction of changes”.

Can you be a little more specific? Are you looking for changes to the act?

[Gwyneth Howell]

Basically, yes, we are.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Because you say in your second paragraph from the top that Canada Post is seeking “to expand--not maintain, but expand”. Might that perhaps be more accurate were it to read “to enforce”?

[Gwyneth Howell]

Again, based on the court's interpretation, yes. Based on the interpretation that these companies used for all the years they were in existence prior to the courts, “expand”.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

You say, and I'm quoting you here from the top of page 2:

...while we respect the role of the courts, it's for the members of this committee of the House to rule on what the act intended to do.

With all respect, I would argue that our role, as parliamentarians and as legislators, is to make acts as clear as we can, and our intent as clear as it can be. None of these gentlemen were here in 1981, so none of them are to blame for any lack of clarity, if you will, in that act. However, I would disagree, in that it is not our role to interpret legislation. Once it is set by Parliament it is the court's role to interpret, and that's what the courts did in this case. So I have to disagree with that part of your testimony.

Can you give me the relative size of the business 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and today? Roughly.

[Gwyneth Howell]

Do you have any idea, Gordon?

[Gordon Taschuk]

I can't speak to the international mailing of the mailers or the remailers, themselves. I'm in a mail service provider role.