Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her excellent question.
She is absolutely right with her first point. People—seniors, but also ordinary people—are very worried about what will happen and about the loss of home delivery.
One woman has started a petition in Quebec. She has already collected over 130,000 signatures, which is a significant number. Every day people come up to us in the street. At our office, we have started petitions, and tens of thousands of people have signed them. Paper petitions are circulating. I had a foot and a half of them on my desk when I came in yesterday.
Canada Post certainly could look at diversifying in the future. We could create a chartered bank. We could work with an existing bank. We could develop partnerships or take care of things and manage them ourselves.
We have seen many different models, such as the models in Switzerland, Great Britain, New Zealand and Italy. They have slightly different models, but they all combine postal and banking services. Regardless of how it is done, it works, so why do we not apply that here?