Mr. Speaker, nobody from Canada Post bothered to tell the senior citizens of Timmins that the local post office is no longer in the business of serving them.
Parcel post pickups have been moved out to drugstores along the highway, so senior citizens without cars can no longer go down to the post office that served them for years and get their mail.
It is not the fault of the local post office staff. They have had their hands tied. Serving the public is what they do and they do well. But under Canada Post's decision to start privatizing rural post offices, there are senior citizens in Timmins who are losing access. The Sturgeon Falls post office has closed. The Iroquois Falls post office has closed. Many other post offices are being moved and shipped off to little boxes in local corner stores.
In whose interest is this? Good local jobs are being traded off. Public service is being impacted. The vital links of a national post office system that was second to none in the world are being carved up and traded off.
It is the short-sighted rip-off of rural Canadians by that ideological driven group of buzzards known as the Conservative Party.