I will speak in French.
Mr. Chair, I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to present the views of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, or CUPW. We represent the thousands of letter carriers who, every day of the week, provide door-to-door mail delivery to millions of people, a service that the government wants to eliminate.
First of all, I would like to say that we are completely opposed to the elimination of door-to-door delivery and that we will mobilize Canadians to fight this unnecessary elimination of an important service. In the next few months, we are going to work with the owners of the Canada Post Corporation, that is to say Canadians, to convince the government to reverse this decision. We are going to work with the millions of Canadians who have home delivery. We are going to work with community organizations, our allies in the labour movement, seniors and people with reduced mobility, and the organizations that represent them. We are going to work with small businesses and home-based businesses. We are going to work with everyone who cares about their postal service to convince the government to reverse this very bad decision.
In our opinion, not only is this a bad decision, but the decision-making process was terribly flawed. You have to wonder why the rush to announce this decision before Christmas. Why not wait until the Canadian Postal Service Charter review scheduled for 2014? If that was too long to wait, why did they not have the review in 2013? Furthermore, why not wait for the 2013 financial results? What was the rush? Was it because the government is worried that Canada Post's financial situation will improve and that it will not be able to justify this announcement, or is it afraid of a major public debate on postal service?
We are also concerned about how the government and Canada Post senior management tried to justify these cuts. We have been told repeatedly that two-thirds of Canadians already have their mail delivered to community mailboxes and that the announced changes are not a problem. The problem is that this is false. Just look at the 2012 Canada Post annual report.
Canada Post delivers mail to 15 million addresses. Of these residents, 25% have their mail delivered to a mailbox in the entrance of their building. They do not have to go outside to a community mailbox. Furthermore, 35% of households have home delivery, 5% have their mail delivered to a rural mailbox located at the end of their laneway, and 12% of households receive their mail at a postal box or have general delivery. Only 25% of Canadians receive their mail through a community mailbox, grouped mailbox or a kiosk.
Let us be clear. All these people knew that they would have that kind of service when they decided to move to those addresses. If the government's plan moves forward, the number of people who will have to walk or drive to get their mail will increase by 132%. The government is trying to change the rules for more than one-third of the population without consulting them and without their consent. Canada Post belongs to all those people. That is no way to treat people, especially the many people who will have difficulty walking to their community mailbox to get their mail or who will even find it impossible to get there.
Many excuses have been given to justify the cuts. There have been many statements by Canada Post management and the government about the solvency deficit of Canada Post Corporation's pension plan. Yet, not once did they say that the plan has a surplus on a going-concern basis. Now that the government has given Canada Post a four-year reprieve from solvency payments, we will see if in that time the long-term interest rates return to their historical average. If they do, the solvency deficit will no longer be an issue.
It is important for the government to know that CUPW and Canada Post are currently holding discussions on the pension plan and that it was CUPW that suggested establishing a joint task force to examine the pension. No matter what happens to interest rates, CUPW will assume its responsibilities and deal with this matter.
I'll switch to English.
In the discussion of these cutbacks, we have heard lots about the estimates of the Conference Board, in a report paid for by Canada Post, that CPC would lose $1 billion in 2020.
I would like to ask all of you if you have read this report. If you have you will see that the Conference Board based the 2020 estimates on the assumption that CPC would lose $250 million in 2012. Were they correct? No. CPC actually made $94 million in 2012. If the Conference Board can be so wrong about 2012 what makes anyone confident they are right about 2020?
We have also heard a lot about the current financial situation of Canada Post and the decline in the volume of letters. Yet, we hear very little of the fact that Canada Post made more than $90 million in profits last year, and hundreds of millions of profit in 2010 and 2009. In fact, the only year Canada Post lost money was the year they had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a 10-year old pay-equity settlement. Also, that year they shut down the post offices for two weeks when they locked out postal workers. With the exception of those years, CPC has been profitable in every year since 1995. During the years of profitability CPC returned over $1.5 billion to the federal government in the form of dividends and income taxes.
This year we do not know what will happen. We hear CPC talking about record parcel volumes, but we know there is also a decline in the volume of letters.
We accept the fact that things are changing. However, we cannot understand why Canada Post will not follow the example of post offices in the U.K., France, Italy, Switzerland, and the many other countries that are currently either beginning a banking service or expanding their existing services.
Today we have thousands of communities with a post office but no bank. We have hundreds of thousands of citizens without bank accounts. Why is it that the management of all of these other postal administrations have had the imagination to expand their financial services and ours do nothing? We need innovation, not excuses for failure.
In closing, I want to repeat our promise that CUPW will do everything possible to stop these cutbacks. This is not the first time a Conservative government has tried to destroy postal services. In 1988 the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney announced that it would privatize and close every post office except 11. We fought against that for four years. We organized and walked with the people in every region, and eventually the Conservatives were defeated and the Liberal government introduced a moratorium on rural postal closures. It is because of our organization that we still have thousands of post offices open to serve the population.
Today, we have a new challenge. Once again, our union will commit itself to preserving the public postal services.