Mr. Speaker, Canada Post has spent an average of $32 million per year in advertising and marketing during the period 1996 to 2004. This amount is comprised of approximately 9,000 transactions annually including different types of expenses such as newspaper ads, television and radio airtime, promotional material, et cetera. Although Canada Post’s accounting and information management system can generate listings of these individual transactions, the data that they contain is a series of accounting codes that by themselves are meaningless.
In order to produce a detailed listing of transactions that have the relevant information, Canada Post would need to take each transaction, return to the source document and manually convert the “accounting data” into readable and understandable information. This represents a massive and expensive effort. For each transaction, Canada Post estimates that it would take an equivalent of thirty person-minutes to identify the source data, obtain the documentation and type in details into listings. For all 80,000 transactions, it would take over 5,300 days of work for an estimated cost of $1.4 million.