Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the committee's invitation today.
My name is Robert Campbell. I'm president and vice-chancellor of Mount Allison University.
I've been a researcher on postal matters since the late 1980s. I've published two books on Canada Post. One is called The Politics of the Post, which is about the history of postal service in Canada, and the other, on modernizing postal service, is The Politics of Postal Transformation, a book that compared Canadian postal systems to developments in the rest of the world. In 2008 I chaired a mandate review for the federal government.
That is by way of background in terms of my interests and what I do when I'm not doing my day job as a university president.
I thought it might be useful for the committee to know what the strategic review panel had to say on this matter in its report. This was not something that we analyzed or made a direct recommendation on, but in our discussion of the future of the universal service obligation, we made the following observation with respect to options for the USO in the future, which, by the way, is the government's responsibility to define. I quote from page 47:
The Advisory Panel believes that the historical service mechanisms for delivery to individual homes—for example, letter carriers going door-to-door or delivery to the end of laneways—should always be open for reconsideration in light of changing demographics and technology....Canada Post should continue to develop and implement the most appropriate delivery approaches to achieve its USO.
Our view was that the issue was how Canada Post was going to deal with its financial and business challenges going forward, and that it had to come up with a business model that was sustainable to maintain a level of service that Canadians were willing to pay for, without government subsidy, but in ways that would be financially self-sustainable over time.
To this extent, I'm here today before the committee with no strong point of view one way or the other on Canada Post's decisions, other than to make the observation that Mr. Stewart-Patterson made earlier, which is that the financial sustainability model of Canada Post is somewhat weak at the moment.
One can look at numbers any which way—there's the famous adage about there being three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics—but it seems pretty clear to me that the core business of Canada Post, that is, the letter-mail business, is weak and declining, and that generates much of its costs, particularly in terms of sorting and delivery. So Canada Post has to make a decision as to how to properly align its costs with its revenues going forward.
The revenue picture for Canada Post on the letter side is not strong. The revenue picture on other areas of its business looks more promising, but these may or may not lend themselves to home delivery, and that's something for the management and board of Canada Post to evaluate.
All countries in the western world, as has been noted, are struggling with transforming a traditional industry, or what might be called a legacy industry, into a modern technological industry in the face of enormous competition, which is what has basically undermined the monopoly of Canada Post.
Different countries manage things in different ways. My wife is Dutch, so I'll give this as one example. If you were to go to Holland today, you would not be able to find a post office. The retail postal network of the Dutch post office doesn't exist anymore. It has been completely outsourced.
That makes some sense in a country like Holland, where real estate is expensive. Their network of delivery continues, but it's a small and compact country. Canada is a very large country across five time zones with a relatively thin population, so the delivery element of the postal service is relatively expensive compared to that of other countries.
In conclusion, I will make one last little comment on postal prices. Historically, postal prices in Canada have been low. They've always been low relative to world prices.
I didn't have a lot of time to do this, but I just quickly got onto the Internet before coming over here. In Europe, in nominal prices, that is, European prices, there are domestic prices and European prices. The countries are pretty small. The domestic price for a stamp in Norway is about $1.68 in Canadian terms. To mail into Europe, which would be like mailing in Canada, it's $2.25. In Denmark it's $1.50 and $2.10. In Italy, France, Germany, the U.K., and the Netherlands, the price of a domestic stamp is around 85¢ to 90¢. The price of a stamp to Europe is about $1.10. That's the comparative context.
Mr. Chair, I'm going to stop there because I know there's only about 20 minutes left in this panel discussion. I'll let committee members have a chance to ask participants a question.