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.