Mr. Speaker, during some of the years when there was postal banking in Canada, Canada Post was turning massive deficits. In the example of New Zealand, the Kiwibank has actually cannibalized postal service because of the enormous demands to capitalize the bank and it came out of the postal service. It is now slashing mail delivery and mail jobs and closing post offices by the dozens, in a small island nation like that.
Now the opposition members are asking us to figure out a way that Canada Post would capitalize a new bank, then operate a bank. It is about $1 million per branch to operate a bank in ongoing costs as well. That is just touching the surface. This is an expensive transition that the member proposes, and she probably does not know what the numbers are that it would actually cost to do that. This is for a model that The Globe and Mail, in an article last May, says is disappearing. This is what it said: “...the branch infrastructure will be rendered increasingly obsolete”.
That is where banking is going. Over 50% of banking consumers in just nine years are going to be Gen Y. They are going to be millennials. They are not going into branches of banks currently, so why would we ask Canada Post to adopt an obsolete system that already does not work? It does not work to cross-subsidize and save postal services in other parts of the world. It makes new revenue for governments, I guess, but it does not cross-subsidize postal service in any example in the world.