Mr. Speaker, we are on the eve of getting the mail moving again. This is an opportunity for me to share a few thoughts with the minister and Canadians in general. It was good to hear the minister say that he supports the collective bargaining process. He has told us that over and over again, so I guess that is his position.
He also said that he takes no satisfaction in having to bring in legislation of this type. There is a point on which the minister and I can agree. Although we as a party asked to get the mail moving again, this seemed to be the only method left to get the mail moving and we reluctantly support this sort of thing.
We believe there is no need to have to legislate back to work for work stoppages, in particular in areas where there is no alternative. There is no alternative to the post office. If you put first class mail out to be delivered it will be delivered by the post office. Nobody is running in competition with the post office.
Where a monopoly exists we have to come up with a mechanism that settles these disputes without a strike or a lockout. The Canadian public simply cannot withstand this kind of blow. People have phoned our offices repeatedly to tell us how much money they are losing and that they will have to lay off employees.
We are concerned that every time this happens, Canada Post is losing another slice of the market share. Not everybody has access to the Internet, e-mail, faxes and so forth. Every time there is a disruption in the service of first class mail, people start to look for alternatives.
A good case in point is a local newspaper back home. It is a member of the weekly newspaper association that has been publishing for the last 50 years in my hometown. Every week it mails out its papers to the outlying areas. It is an ad journal with no subscription rates. It simply goes out to every household in the coverage area and is paid for by the advertising. I spoke with the editor of that paper just recently and he said that his postal costs were about one thousand dollars a week. As soon as this postal disruption was talked about, as soon as there was a lot of chest thumping and we knew that there was going to be a postal disruption, this editor set the wheels to deliver his paper without Canada Post.
What they actually came up with was a distribution system where they had news boxes at convenient points all through their circulation area that would be stocked on the same day that the paper was printed.
Everybody now is going to get their paper on the same day whether they live in the town that the paper is printed in or whether they live in an adjacent town or somewhere in between in a rural area. They will all get their paper the same day.
The most significant thing is that besides the fact that it is going to cost him half of what it did through Canada Post, $500 a week as opposed to $1,000 a week, this editor has no intention of going back to Canada Post once the mail has resumed. I think that is a shame because there is another slice of market share that Canada Post has lost.
One of the things that was very hotly contested during all of these labour talks was the fear of lay-offs in their jobs. CUPW kept saying that they were—