Government Operations committee  I would agree as well. I think the big problem we have when we're dealing with people who don't already have enough money, who are economically suppressed, is that having a payday lender in there just continues that cycle of poverty. We have an opportunity here to actually break cycles of poverty and then move forward.

Government Operations committee  They'll try. Of course they're going to try. This is a revenue stream. They were even against expanding the Canada Pension Plan because it would cut into their RRSP and mutual funds. Of course they're going to try to fight back against this. Frankly, they owe that to their shareholders, but we're accountable to our membership, and you're accountable to the citizens of Canada.

Government Operations committee  The preference, absolutely, would be to go through the outlets first, if you have an outlet in the town. If it isn't an option, if the credit unions have already gone in there and taken care of it, then maybe that's not the option we want to look at in that region, but we have 6,000 postal outlets around the country and a lot of the banking....

Government Operations committee  Anything right now is worth investigating. If they are already forming partnerships with the postal outlets in those areas, take a look at the model. I think that's the thing. We shouldn't be focusing solely on this being a doomsday scenario and Canada Post going down. Have an optimistic....

Government Operations committee  On this point I'm not too much of an expert. I don't know an exact number I could throw at you, but if we haven't even looked at other revenue streams, you can't answer that question just yet. We have to look at how you can make money for this service.

Government Operations committee  That's where the test cases would come in, to find out how much we are going to be able to make. If we're going to be talking about what we need to get as a subsidy and what's acceptable, I can't answer. I can't throw a number out there for you.

Government Operations committee  I'm not really one to quote Warren Buffett, but he has already come out very strongly that if you keep stacking wealth at the top, it doesn't really do very much to get the economy churning. Getting more dollars in average working people's pockets, I think, is probably the best way to actually get an economy churning, so I'm going to quote Warren Buffett on that one.

Government Operations committee  I would argue that in some jurisdictions around the world, when you have the mixed delivery system, you have a public sector player and a private sector player, and this keeps prices down. If I had to give you an example here in Winnipeg, it would be the big debate we had over golf course privatization a number of years ago.

Government Operations committee  I would have to believe that we're not going to be dumping that many employees. We're not going to be hiring that many right off the bat, right? There have to be some test case scenarios that we would want to look at first, so I think a gradual approach escalating into that would be probably the most prudent.

Government Operations committee  I guess if you're looking for ways to make more money and have more revenue for this service, get into postal banking. I mean, we're leaving money on the table when we're not looking at other jurisdictions and seeing what they're doing. They might be laughing at us. If we're looking for ways to pay for it, start expanding your business model into a service model.

Government Operations committee  I agree. I think it's a public service. I mean, in a country this big, you need to have some kind of service that can deliver parcels, that can deliver mail and so forth. I would first and foremost see it as a public service in a country of this size.

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for pronouncing my name correctly. I appreciate that. My name is Dave Sauer. I'm the president of the Winnipeg Labour Council. We're a union federation, a small council. We represent about 45,000 workers here in the City of Winnipeg, from 65 affiliated union locals.