Evidence of meeting #41 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was post.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
Earlier, we were discussing the moratorium on closing post offices, and you said that this did not affect urban and suburban offices.
We know that you have projections. Will you be providing us with the list of post offices that will not be subject to the moratorium?
Is that the same question that our colleague Mr. Dewar asked?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Yes, we have a list of corporate offices that are not subject to the moratorium. Yes, we can provide you with a copy.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
Mr. Chairman, the witness has committed to providing us with a list.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Yes, that is no problem.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
As far as the remailers are concerned, this seemed acceptable in the business up until 2004, but since 2004, you instituted legal proceedings. What was the risk? Are they your competition? Were they growing too quickly than your ability to be able to compete with them? I would like you to give me a picture of what remailing is. What is your greatest challenge in this area?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
It is not an equal playing field; that is the problem. We have the responsibility to offer service to all Canadians at a set price, and as a result, our cost structure is much higher than it would be if we did not have this type of responsibility. Foreign postal administrations do not have this responsibility. Therefore, what they do is cherry picking: they pick the cherries from our market and they have no responsibility in that regard. It is not balanced.
Free trade is a good thing if it happens in an orderly fashion on a level playing field and if all of the stakeholders have the same responsibilities and the same business opportunities. This is currently not the case. If you give foreign postal administrations the most profitable part of our market while they have no responsibility to deliver the mail in Canada, we will no longer have the means to serve Canadians.
Remailing is illegal because it's not happening on a level playing field.
Bloc
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
We estimate our losses to be from $60 million to $80 million per year, and it is the most profitable part of the business.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
All right. Therefore, this directly affects your—
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
This directly affects the means that you, parliamentarians, have given us to meet our commitments to all Canadians.
Bloc
Mario Laframboise Bloc Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC
What advice would you give us? Would you advise us to allow you to appear before the courts and see what happens?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
No, we would advise you to study the situation overall, and not one single aspect of it. Otherwise, the same thing will happen in Canada as happened in the United Kingdom: you will have a crown corporation that no longer works. We will find ourselves back in the time when the corporation lost millions of dollars per year. That can happen very quickly.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I have just a few questions. It's good to see you eye-to-eye for the first time.
I must say that last year, when you cut off rural service in my riding, you galvanized a community as I've never seen one galvanized before. In the public information sessions we had people swinging from the chandeliers.
You said in your opening statement that you are not a safety expert, but at the same time, when these services were cut off last year there were no criteria or anything used to cut them off. People were given their one-day notice and told to go pick up their mail at a post office.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Mr. Allen, you know that's not true.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
It is true. And in the absence of the unanimous vote in this House and our directive, I'm a little bit concerned about where we'd be going and where we'd be sitting right now without that.
I have a couple of questions.
I've seen your traffic tool that you're using to assess these, and there are some reasonable things there, but I'm not seeing that it looks at the high-level kinds of things. I'll use two examples. One of the highways in New Brunswick was cut off for service, but there's a new four-lane being built. The traffic on that highway will be reduced by 90% next year, and nobody even knew that. The second thing is that there was a route out there that was a dead end. Traffic goes by at maybe two cars a day. I don't understand the common sense of that.
Given that, if these places are so unsafe, then why isn't DOT asking people to move their driveways? Why are school buses going there? Why is garbage being picked up and flyers? Maybe you can help me understand the common sense or lack thereof in the decision-making process of Canada Post.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Well, the first thing is we did not cut off service. An individual exercised their legal right under Labour Canada safety laws to refuse to work because that individual believed the work was unsafe.
Conservative
Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB
I think you should go back and check your Penniac records, because I don't know if that's true.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
I don't know, sir, if it was in exactly your territory, but in Fredericton, I know there was a legal refusal to work.
Conservative
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
We would never just cut off someone's mail. In fact, the approach that we now take with our people is if you feel that a situation is unsafe, don't refuse to work right away; at least give us an opportunity to go look at it.
In terms of common sense, I don't know every single situation, but I can tell you that if it's safe, Mr. Allen, we will be restoring service. We are going to deliver mail to the lot line in rural Canada in every safe case we can. And I believe that the traffic assessment tool that we have today is a more precise and refined tool developed with the best safety expertise that we could find, and I believe that you're going to see that every safe box has lot line delivery. So if these commonsensical situations are as you describe, then you can feel confident that if there is no safety issue, lot line delivery will be restored.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
You're just within a few seconds, so I'm going to defer to Mr. Bell.
Liberal
Don Bell Liberal North Vancouver, BC
Thank you. I'm going to share my time with Mr. Bélanger.
I would like to start off by Mr. Temelkovski's question. What percentage of the 27,000 rural boxes did not meet the safety requirement standard?