Mr. Speaker, I wish to commend the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell for his speech. I do not know whether he remembers, but we once met at the Saint-Clément post office, one of the post offices that was closed. I agree with the hon. member that the previous government lacked the most elementary respect for every aspect of rural development and for the vital role played by post offices in rural communities.
I agree with his objections to the policy of also making closures contingent on the age of the postmaster. I do not think the policy made much sense.
In any event, the moratorium ordered by the Liberal government was also mentioned by the Bloc québécois during the last election campaign, and in fact, we can say it probably came as a result of the will of the community and the leadership provided by people like members of Rural Dignity and the postmasters' association.
I think we have them to thank for this decision, and I believe that Quebecers and Canadians sent a very clear signal to the government that they rejected this somewhat ruthless policy.
Where the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell and I differ is on the quality of the moratorium. The one we have now is full of holes. I will give you an example. The minister has refused to reconsider past mistakes. The member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell talked earlier about the post office in St. Albert and I am talking about the post office in Saint-Clément.
The Liberals, who were then in the opposition, supported the reopening but, as soon as they were elected, they declared a moratorium. The Liberals now completely discard the possibility to examine those cases where real flaws have been identified, even the ones they denounced when they were in the opposition.
I have a short message to convey in this regard. The people of Saint-Clément are very patient. They take their time but they usually win and they have taken steps to have the post office reopened.
This will be an opportunity to see if the Liberal government, with this moratorium, really wants the communities to have their post office, because the will shown by the people of Saint-Clément will be supported by those of the area and-which will be very different from the last time-by the member for Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup who supports people of Saint-Clément, rather than the opposite.
The moratorium declared by the Liberals also has other flaws, for instance the fact there will be no post office closing in municipalities with less than two post offices. This may look fine, but I am witnessing in my own riding another situation rather absurd, I must say, where it has been decided that a part of the mail going to Rivière-du-Loup would be sorted in Rimouski, approximately 100 kilometres away.
So they do not close the post office in a municipality-the moratorium forbids it-but they dismantle it from within. It certainly does not look like the best solution.
I feel this is more like playing on words. They are not respecting the essence of the moratorium by doing things like that, but there again they launched a process which I hope will succeed in guaranteeing the future of the post office in Rivière-du-Loup and will, at the same time, contribute to the economic development of the region.
As we said before, I think good common sense would dictate that the post office not be closed simply because the postmaster is reaching retirement age and that we do not, for no reasonable cause, send a postmaster to sort mail in a post office elsewhere when in fact there is work to be done sorting mail in his own municipality.
I believe the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell is very persistent since he is tabling the same bill again, but his government does not have the same kind of backbone. In fact, the government could have proposed such a bill; the Bloc Quebecois would not have been opposed to the implementation of a regulation mechanism for the operations of the Canada Post Corporation. Provided that the system we set up is not too bureaucratic, I believe that, indeed, the action plan of an agency like Canada Post Corporation needs to be reviewed by the elected representatives of the people, because the objectives given to the corporation are not necessarily social, whereas government objectives could be.
I am glad that this bill has been introduced, but I am sorry that it is not a votable item, because there will be no real follow-up on it. Moreover, it is not introduced by the government, and the government should be criticized on that score.
What we need in this area is a real policy, a comprehensive policy that would show that we want to behave differently from the Conservatives. If we had a system guaranteeing openness of actions and mandate, if we had a board of directors made up differently, for example with representatives of the regions of Quebec or Canada, Canada Post would be more likely to listen to the regions and to consider more than strict productivity.
I believe that the employees of Canada Post do their jobs. They do them well, but according to the mandates they receive. If the board of directors was made up of people concerned with rural development they would certainly act differently.
Also, and this is quite obvious, we really need to change the approach to human resource management. Do you know that presently, in the post office of a medium-size town, there is no postmaster? Someone is in charge of sorting, someone else is in charge of marketing, but there is no real boss. That means that within the same organisation someone is only concerned about costs whereas somebody else deals with sales. No small business managed that way would last more than a year. There is nobody to balance both sides of the operation and that puts us in a ludicrous situation.
Moreover, there is a long history of bitter labour disputes, and a great degree of openness is needed to create a different climate at the Post Office.
Everything remains to be done at the Canada Post Corporation. We must salute the efforts made by the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, and recognize the need for an adequate regulation process that would not be overly bureaucratic, but we must go further than that. It is now up to the government. It must give a clear message. We need more than a moratorium full of loopholes which allows the Canada Post Corporation to pursue its down-sizing process without regards for the needs of regional communities. The government must make its position known and state unequivocally that the Post Office, as well as VIA Rail and other transportation companies, are regional development tools.
It is only when we receive this kind of message from the government, through its minister, that we will be able to say that the mission has been accomplished. In the meantime, everything remains to be done.