1982-11-23

MOTIONS UNDER S.O. 43   CORPORATE AFFAIRS GOVERNMENT POLICY ON PROVISION OF GRANTS

['No.']
Mr. Stan Darling (Parry Sound-Muskoka):: Madam Speaker, 1 rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43. It is said that a man is known by the company he keeps. I think the same is true of Governments. Canadians want desperately to think of themselves as winners. We need to, if we are to alter the public psychology which has been created by the economic policies of this Government. In view of this, a glance at the list of "winners" upon whom this Government has been bestowing our money is revealing-Chrysler, Dome, Maislin, Massey-Ferguson, and the list goes on. Indeed, the only contact that this Government has with the real winners in our corporate society is either to drive them out of the country or to sell them party memberships. Therefore, I wish to move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Prince Edward-Hastings (Mr. Ellis):
That the Prime Minister and the Government reverse its thinking and attempt to reward success rather than failure as has been the case up to the present time.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.



Mr. Mel Gass (Malpeque):: Madam Speaker, a regulation was recently introduced by the Ontario Transport Board requiring that all bus charters obtain a licence to drive through Ontario. Legan Bus Lines, a motor coach company from Edmonton, Alberta, has had its licence application blocked by Greyhound Lines of Calgary, thereby forcing them to travel through the U.S.A. on their way to the Maritime Provinces. The additional cost in travelling through the States could adversely affect the future of this tour. I therefore move,
seconded by the Hon. Member for Fundy-Royal (Mr. Corbett):
That the Minister of Transport intervene in this matter in order to protect the interests of Legan Bus Lines and also the tourism industry in the Maritime Provinces.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


INDIAN AFFAIRS
Mr. Jim Manly (Cowichan-Malahat-The Islands):: Madam Speaker, at the primary school on the Blackfoot Reserve near Gleichen, Alberta, children are crowded into classrooms in the school's basement, kitchen, and the principal's office. There are problems with lighting, heating and sanitation, and the fire marshal has expressed his concern. For years the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has known of the need for more classroom space. I therefore move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Prince Albert (Mr. Hovdebo):
That this House condemn the Government for its indifference to the educational needs of Indian children and instruct the Minister for Indian Affairs and Northern Development to ensure that portable classrooms are in operation by December 1 of this year, and to provide funds to start construction of new classrooms by next spring.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


AWARDS AND DECORATIONS
Mr. Marcel Prud'homme (Saint-Denis):: Madam Speaker, I wish to rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43. Previously, the Prix Femina was awarded to Gabrielle Roy, born in Manitoba, and the Prix Goncourt to Antonine Maillet, born in New Brunswick, and today, I move, and I am honoured to do

November 23, 1982
so, seconded by the Hon. Member for Joliette (Mr. La Salle), the Hon. Member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Deans) and my colleague from Ottawa-Vanier (Mr. Gauthier):
That the House extend its warmest congratulations to Anne Hebert, born in Sainte-Catherine de Fossambault, who has just been awarded the Prix Femina for her outstanding novel "Les Fous de Bassan".


Madam Speaker:: I am sure the House would like to express its appreciation by applauding this achievement.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!
confrontation he had with his colleague, the Hon. Member for Cape Breton-The Sydneys in Nova Scotia this past weekend over this issue, and finally to inform the House whether reports that Algoma Steel, which may be put on the auction block by its owner, CP Limited, is a factor in his decision. Is the welfare of Sydney, Nova Scotia, to be sacrificed to protect Algoma, its only Canadian competitor in making steel rails?


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


OIL DISCOVERY AT RUMSEY, ALTA.
Mr. Arnold Malone (Crowfoot):: Madam Speaker, Gulf Oil has made a very significant oil discovery at the community of Rumsey in east central Alberta where, reportedly, there is a production potential of many thousands of barrels of oil per day, and speculation has it that the potential of the oilfield discovered is as large as that of the Pembina Oilfield. Since this new supply of pumped oil should reduce our dependency on imported oil, I move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Vegreville (Mr. Mazankowski) and the Hon. Member for Prince Albert (Mr. Hovdebo):
That this House commend the fact that this new oilfield has been discovered, and further commend the Government of Canada for the infrastructure that is presently in place and encourage that these facilities be retained in place so that the communities can prosper and new industries can be developed to their potential and to the advantage of all Canadians.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.
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*


LABOUR CONDITIONS
Mr. Lyle S. Kristiansen (Kootenay West):: Madam Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43 on a matter of pressing and honest public importance. The Citibank of New York recently released a study on international wage comparisons showing that Canadian workers have received lower wage increases over the last decade than nine of the ten countries surveyed, namely, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and further showing that Canadians have fallen from being the second highest to the second lowest paid amongst major industrial economies in that period. 1 therefore move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Beaches (Mr. Young):
That this House recognize that Canadian wage earners are not the cause of our current inflationary spiral.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


INDUSTRY
Hon. Elmer M. MacKay (Central Nova):: Madam Speaker, the interruption of the Sydney Steel Business Plan, to which the Government agreed, and which the Secretary of State for External Affairs (Mr. MacEachen) solemnly signed, has affected not only the steel industry in our region but also coal miners in Cape Breton and the viability of the Hawker-Siddeley plant in Trenton, Nova Scotia. Therefore I move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Kindersley-Lloydminster (Mr. McKnight):
That the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, on motions, explain why, despite success in maintaining employment, adjusting to lower volumes and producing a high quality product in this time of economic recession, he is discriminating against Sydney Steel, when hundreds of millions of dollars are being distributed to industries in Central Canada, and also to reconcile the public


EXTERNAL AID
Mr. Benno Friesen (Surrey-White Rock-North Delta):: Madam Speaker, in view of the fact that, on Saturday, Tanzania banned visits by Canadian journalists following a television documentary on that country's severe economic and development problems, thus suggesting that Tanzania does not want any independent scrutiny of Canada's $25 million annual aid program to that country; and in view of the fact that this ban was imposed against the wishes of both CIDA and Canada's Department of External Affairs, and despite the fact that the journalist in question had already been issued a valid visitor's permit, I move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Peace River (Mr. Cooper):
November 23, 1982

That, because Canadian Government sources already believe that Tanzania fears further criticism might jeopardize already controversial aid projects, this Government suspend all foreign aid until such time as Tanzania is prepared to revoke its decision.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


PENSIONS
Mr. Neil Young (Beaches):: Madam Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43. In view of the opposition from all sides of the House, and Canadians generally, to the Government's attack on retirement incomes for Canada's elderly during 1983 and 1984 under its six and five per cent program, I move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Winnipeg North Centre (Mr. Knowles):
That this House demands that the Government withdraw Bill C-131 and Bill C-133 from the Order Paper immediately.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.


GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES
Mr. Joe Reid (St. Catharines):: Madam Speaker, this Liberal Government is moving in a heavy-handed way to penalize Canada's senior citizens by imposing on them a cutback in the indexing of their old age security. The Minister of National Health and Welfare, rather than taking up the fight on behalf of those pensioners, has bluntly told them that they must "lead the fight in the battle against inflation." Given this punitive action against the very people who have contributed so greatly to the building of this great nation of ours, I therefore move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Kingston and the Islands (Miss MacDonald):
That the Minister of National Health and Welfare demand of her colleagues that they lead the fight against inflation by reducing waste and unnecessary duplication in their respective Departments rather than unjustly laying this burden on the shoulders of Canada's elderly.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.
Oral Questions MEDICAL CARE


GOVERNMENT PROPOSALS TO PROVINCES
Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg-Birds Hill):: Madam Speaker, in view of the fact that the Minister of National Health and Welfare recently told me in the House of Commons that she only intends to inform and involve Members of Parliament in formation of the new Canada Health Act after negotiations with the Provinces have been, in her words, "finalized", and in view of the fact that the President of the Canadian Medical Association is going around the country making certain claims about a so-called draft, and trying to exploit constitutional tensions instead of arguing from a medical standpoint, I move, seconded by the Hon. Member for Saskatoon East (Mr. Ogle):
That the Minister of National Health and Welfare table whatever proposals she has made to the Provinces so that Members of Parliament who care about Medicare can respond to the hysteria of the CM A in a more informed and less speculative way than is now possible, and also so that MP's who care about Medicare can make sure that the Minister's proposals represent a strengthening of Medicare and not a capitulation to Conservative provincial Governments.


Madam Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent for this motion?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some Hon. Members:: No.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Hon. John C. Crosbie (St. John's West):: My question, Madam Speaker, is for the Prime Minister. Canada has just had a high-level delegation at Moscow conducting negotiations that we are told are aimed at resuming cultural and scientific contacts that began under the Friendship Treaty of the Prime Minister with the U.S.S.R. in 1971. These exchanges were halted after the Afghanistan invasion in December 1979. We are told that the Government hopes to have a full range of exchanges with the Soviet Union before the end of 1983.
Has the Government made it a condition, as it should, that before Canada agrees to any improvement in its relations with the U.S.S.R., first the U.S.S.R. has to observe the Helsinki Accord, permit emigration to those who wish to emigrate, and treat properly people such as Mr. Shcharansky who are now suffering from inhumane imprisonment? Is it also a condition that the Soviet authorities withdraw their armed forces from Afghanistan and, finally, that they should encourage Poland to revoke martial law and release those who are now in prison for
COMMONS DEBATES_________________________ November 23, 1982
Oral Questions
supporting Solidarity? Are these conditions for any improvement in relations on our part?


Right Hon. P. E. Trudeau (Prime Minister):: Madam Speaker, I am not aware of the detailed mandate given to the high-level committee that went to Moscow. 1 cannot say if all or some of these conditions are included in its negotiating mandate.


INSTRUCTIONS TO DELEGATION
John Carnell Crosbie: Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister is the head of the Government and some seem to think the fount of its wisdom, such as it is. Is the Prime Minister telling the House that he did not instruct or have his Secretary of State for External Affairs instruct this high-level delegation that the three conditions I mentioned, and I will not repeat them, are essential to be met by the U.S.S.R. before we can resume a warmer relationship with them? Did he not inform them of that.
Does he know that the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs who headed the delegation is reported as having said in this morning's testimony that, "essentially there have been no visible signs of change in the Soviet attitudes in any of those three matters"? That being the case, will the Prime Minister inform the House whether we are going to proceed with this opening toward greater exchanges and the like, if there are no visible signs of any change in their position?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, if the Hon. Member is asking me whether I have seen the detailed mandate given to the delegation, the answer is I have not. As to the success or otherwise of the meeting that was held between officials in Moscow, I have no report on that.
I imagine I will receive one as soon as the delegation returns.


John Carnell Crosbie: Madam Speaker, surely the delegation did not proceed to the U.S.S.R. without instructions from the Prime Minister's Government as to what they were to seek to achieve, and what Canadian conditions are before we can have an improved relationship with the U.S.S.R.? Surely the Prime Minister cannot expect us to accept that?


PRIME MINISTER'S STATEMENT IN MUNICH
John Carnell Crosbie: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question to the Prime Minister is this. According to the Deputy Minister we had no prior consultation with the United States or our NATO allies in this matter, nor did the Soviets initiate this rapprochement. In Munich, on his recent trip, the Prime Minister said that because of the death of Mr. Brezhnev it was a good chance, and I quote the Prime Minister, "to try and turn a new leaf with the Soviet Union". Why is the Prime Minister suggesting that we, and not the Soviet Union, should turn a new leaf? Is it the fault of the West that they invaded Afghanistan, that the Polish martial law tragedy has occurred, or that there are human
rights violations in Russia? Why should we be turning the new leaf and not the U.S.S.R.?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, the Hon. Member misunderstood my previous answer. I did not say that the committee had no mandate. I said that I had not given it any specific mandate. I had not seen that mandate before it left. Obviously I discussed the matter with the Minister in general terms. The Secretary of State for External Affairs is at this moment chairing a ministerial meeting of the GATT in Geneva. I am sure he could answer these questions. I am telling the Hon. Member that I was not involved in the specifying of that particular mandate.
As to consultation with our allies, there probably has been some. I do not know. I do know that our allies do not consult us every time they want to make even the slightest gesture. I know there is a constant stream of American businessmen going to Moscow. There is a constant stream of Congressional and Senatorial delegations in Moscow, and they have not consulted me on that. I just want to make it clear that Canada should not be the only country that does not have any kind of relations with the Soviet Union. When something like 150 United States businessmen are in Moscow this week to do business, I do not think Canadians should forever renounce the possibility of having commercial transactions for the benefit of Canada in that country.


John Carnell Crosbie: This was a high-level delegation of the Government of Canada, not of Canadian businessmen who are quite free to go to the U.S.S.R. just as are American businessmen. This was a Government delegation trying an apparent new initiative in the East-West over-all relationship.


RESPONSIBILITY FOR INITIATIVE
John Carnell Crosbie: Will the Prime Minister deal with the question of who should turn the new leaf? Is it our responsibility to turn a new leaf with respect to the Soviet Union, or is it their responsibility, in view of their actions in Afghanistan, in Poland, with Mr. Shcharansky, with emigres, with all of the other brutal, tyrannical acts they have been practising for the last several years? On whom is the onus to improve this relationship?


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, I think the Soviet Union should turn a new leaf.


TANZANIA-ENTRY DENIED TO CANADIAN JOURNALIST
Mr. Donald W. Munro (Esquimalt-Saanich):: Madam Speaker, my question is also directed to the Right Hon. Prime Minister. I hope that he will not plead ignorance of this matter as he has pleaded ignorance of the instructions to the delegation to the Soviet Union. I refer to the incident in Tanzania, one of Canada's favourite recipients of aid, some $300 million
November 23, 1982

worth over the last 20 years. 1 am wondering whether the Prime Minister has been made aware of the refusal of Tanzania to accept a Canadian correspondent who was accompanying a CIDA official, to visit CIDA projects, and if he is aware, what action has he taken about it?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: No, Madam Speaker, 1 was not aware, if I had been, I do not think I would have taken any action.


NECESSITY FOR INFORMATION ON CIDA OPERATIONS
Donald W. Munro: I should have thought the Prime Minister would have been anxious to make sure that his friend, Julius Nyerere-I see he is passing the question on to someone else, Madam Speaker.


Some Hon. Members:: Ask your question.


Donald W. Munro: 1 would have thought that the Prime Minister would have been anxious to intervene, if only to keep in the eyes of Canada the good name of his friend, Julius Nyerere, and Tanzania, so they would lift this ban against Canadian newspapermen and so that Canada might know what does go on with CIDA's operations in Tanzania.


Hon. Charles Lapointe (Minister of State (External Relations)):: Mr. Speaker, we are aware that Mr. Travers was unable to obtain permission to enter Tanzania with CIDA officers when the latest experts meeting on Canadian aid for Tanzania was held. We intend to express our disapproval and regret in this respect to the Tanzanian authorities. In most cases where we have aid programs, they must be reassessed regularly to consider any problems that may arise, and that is why a meeting of experts is being held in Tanzania to examine all aspects of our aid program in that country.
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NUCLEAR ARMAMENTS
Hon. Edward Broadbent (Oshawa):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. Last week he stressed the importance of what he said was the need for "curbing the arms race and affecting disarmament". Many military experts as well as politicians in the United States, as well as Members of this House who issued a report on the subject, contend that there exists rough parity in nuclear strength between the two great super powers. Considering that yesterday President Reagan took a significant and dangerous step toward escalating the armaments race in the nuclear field by the deployment of 100 MX missiles, will the Prime Minister take the opportunity to support his expression of concern by concrete action in attempting to persuade President Reagan to reverse this potentially very dangerous decision?
Oral Questions


Charles Lapointe: Madam Speaker, in President Reagan's statement to all Americans last night, there were some encouraging signs when, for instance, he mentioned a wide range of cases where advance notice would be given of nuclear tests and all governments with nuclear arms would be notified of potential accidents and also of how the missiles would be deployed. So these are encouraging signs if we want to achieve a balanced reduction of nuclear arms throughout the world, and that is something Canada hopes will happen as soon as possible. As far as deploying the missiles is concerned, the Hon. Leader of the New Democratic Party is aware that President Reagan has decided to concentrate these new intercontinental ballistic missiles in a location where antinuclear missiles already exist, and I believe the matter will be brought before Congress, although the plan would not become operational before the end of 1985 or 1986, and then only if Congress gives its approval.


REQUEST THAT PRIME MINISTER ACT ON ISSUE
John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister and I hope he will have respect for the House to answer it.
The Prime Minister goes around the world portraying himself as a man committed to disarmament and peace. I think his understanding is, if he would declare it openly to the House, that we now have a concrete example of one superpower significantly escalating the nuclear arms race.


Some Hon. Members:: Russia.


John Edward Broadbent: I would like the Prime Minister to state on behalf of his Government that he will take public action opposing such action by the United States, just as he would-I say to my Conservative friends on the right-oppose the Soviet Union if they did the same thing?


Some Hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


John Carnell Crosbie: He would not oppose.


Charles Lapointe: Madam Speaker, 1 think that as far as the question of nuclear parity between the super powers is concerned, since we ourselves have no nuclear arms on our territory and have always supported negotiations aimed at a mutual and balanced reduction of nuclear arms, perhaps the Hon. Member's sources have informed him that nuclear parity has now been achieved. President Reagan has other sources of information, as he showed last night on television, if the Hon. Member was watching. The Hon. Member is asking us to make a value judgment which we are not ready to give at this time.

November 23, 1982
Oral Questions


John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense; George F. Kennen, a former senior EI.S. diplomatic official; Senator Kennedy, as well as over 200 members of the U.S. House of Representatives take the same position that this party does, namely, that there is already in existence rough nuclear parity, and anyone who wants to show leadership in the world should be trying to de-escalate, not escalate, the arms race.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


REQUEST THAT PRIME MINISTER MAKE STATEMENT
John Edward Broadbent: Madam Speaker, in that context I would like to ask the Prime Minister, since more than 20 municipalities in the Province of British Columbia have followed other municipal voters all across the country by voting in excess of 75 per cent in favour of calling for Canadian leadership in the disarmament movement, will the Prime Minister-I repeat for the third time-take this occasion, and not rely on another minister, to follow up on public statements he has made outside this House calling for disarmament, by getting out front here in the House of Commons and saying he will appeal directly to President Reagan to reverse this important decision?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker-


John Carnell Crosbie: The shrinking violet comes to his feet.


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Not for you, my friend.


John Carnell Crosbie: Do it for the people instead.


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Yes. Well, if you let me talk, maybe the people will hear my answer.


John Carnell Crosbie: Well, answer the question.


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, I think the Hon. Leader of the New Democratic Party is expressing a valid concern, one which has been expressed by this Party and by myself repeatedly. I have made speeches to the United Nations at the Special Session on Disarmament to that effect; I have made speeches in the United States and other forums. 1 want him to know that the Government has spoken in NATO as a member fo that Alliance and in favour of the two tracks; first, to make sure that there was reasonable parity on both sides and, second, to make sure that both sides were earnestly engaged in de-escalation or in reduction of nuclear arms. That has been the position of the Government, and it remains our position. That is the message I conveyed to the leaders in Moscow last week, and that is the message 1 have conveyed to our American friends when I have had occasion to raise the point.
[DOT] (M30)


John Edward Broadbent: What about this occasion?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Hon. Member is referring to a speech made last night. I have not seen that speech. It seemed to me
that the Minister responsible for External Affairs was very conversant with the speech that had been made, and he dealt with the questions. I preferred to let a man who knew what the President said deal with the subject. That is why I asked him to answer, not in any way because our policy is one of which we are ashamed. On the contrary, I think the position of the Canadian Government has been one of leadership.
The Hon. Member quotes these various American politicians and, indeed, some of the referenda. Basically I think when they talk of "freeze" they really mean that they want a de-escalation by both sides. They are not saying that automatically, today, the Soviet Union or the United States should stop building arms. They say they want both sides to negotiate seriously toward a reduction of those arms. That is their position, and that is also our position.


NATIONAL PARKS
Mr. Gordon Taylor (Bow River):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of the Environment. How does the Minister justify swapping a beautiful park in Banff valued at $1,368,000, on which Judd Buchanan, a former Liberal Minister, wants to build an apartment building, for four residential lots located in the Cave and Basin residential area, with a maximum total value of $600,000 or lower, without public tender, without an environmental or impact study, thereby denying public input until about the time the permit was issued? Will the Minister, even at this late date, cancel the permit so that people can save what is left of this beautiful park?


Hon. John Roberts (Minister of the Environment):: Madam Speaker, a variety of subjects are contained in the Hon. Member's question and I shall try to reply to all of them. He may wish to ask a supplementary question if I pass over one of them.
Several of the facts cited by the Hon. Member are not accurate. An environmental assessment of the proposal was made. Tender arrangements were not suitable for this particular situation because the proposal being made was for an exchange of terrain that was already in possession of the group concerned. The initiative for this exchange came from Parks Canada officials because they believed the original proposal on the site then considered would carry with it more difficulties and drawbacks from the point of view of Parks Canada and of the people of Banff, than the exchange which was suggested.


Gordon Edward Taylor: Madam Speaker, as the development officer said when he resigned yesterday, the deal smells to high Heaven. The Minister's words do not make it smell any sweeter.
November 23, 1982


REQUEST FOR MINISTER'S RESIGNATION
Gordon Edward Taylor: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Right Hon. Prime Minister. Given that the Minister ignored and did not follow the environmental assessment and review process set out by Cabinet, and given that the negotiations between Judd Buchanan, the former Liberal Cabinet Minister, and company, and the Minister and Parks Canada were kept secret for two years until a leak brought the matter to the attention of the people, and then a permit was issued within three weeks, when it usually takes three months, and given that the departmental officer, a man with 35 years experience, resigned yesterday because he could not be part of the destruction of a beautiful park and could not stomach the Liberal patronage, and for several other reasons, will the Prime Minister ask the Minister of the Environment for his resignation? Otherwise he is going to be a lame duck Minister.


John (Moody) Roberts: Madam Speaker, the same answer is appropriate to the second question of the Hon. Member as to the first. The allegations he makes are not, in fact, true. The proper environmental processes were followed. There has been consultation with the public as far back as 1972-


Gordon Edward Taylor: They came out on November 16.


John (Moody) Roberts: -and again in 1980. The environmental review was completed in 1981. The allegations which the Hon. Member makes are unfounded. He says such things as there is a smell surrounding the affair. If he has some concrete allegations to make about any impropriety, let him do so. There is no impropriety in this situation.


REQUEST FOR REFERRAL TO PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE
Hon. Erik Nielsen (Yukon):: Madam Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the Prime Minister. In view of the involvement of a former Member of the Government and the apparent precipitous haste with which these arrangements were made to turn over valuable Government property to what appears to be a rather favoured company, Meteor Developments Ltd., in which Mr. Buchanan holds a significant interest, and in view of the fact that the Prime Minister is custodian of conflict of interest guidelines and the adherence to those guidelines by Ministers and former Ministers, would he cause this matter to be referred to an appropriate committee of this House as quickly as possible, in order that there might be a complete, thorough, and truthful examination of all the facts surrounding this transaction with Meteor Developments Ltd.?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Madam Speaker, I am surprised at the Hon. Member for Yukon. He does not usually have to read his questions. He can generally ask them without referring to a prepared text. If that had been the case now, he would have been able to listen to the answers given by the Minister and then he would not have had to read
Oral Questions
the question. If there is nothing irregular, why should we set up a committee?


REPRESENTATIONS MADE BY BANFF RESIDENTS-OFFICIALS' STATEMENTS
Hon. John A. Fraser (Vancouver South):: Madam Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of the Environment. Press reports indicate that the Minister received 1,200 letters or representations from the population of Banff, which numbers in total under 4,000. I should like to ask the Minister if he received those representations and, if so, why he did not act on them, given the fact that for some time now, as he knows, there have been constant requests and demands by residents of the Banff townsite for an increasing share in self-government.
The other question I would put to the Minister-in view of the resignation yesterday of a senior official and in view of the conflicting statements by officials, including the park superintendent-is just who is running Parks Canada?


John (Moody) Roberts: Madam Speaker, I think there are at least three different questions there. In answer to the first question, I would tell the Hon. Member that there was public consultation about the zoning of this property as far back as 1972. At that time the public was consulted and there was no indication of any objection to the zoning which took place at that time.


Gordon Edward Taylor: Tell the whole story.


John (Moody) Roberts: In 1980 the public of the area was again consulted about the zoning of that particular property and, once again, there was no objection to the zoning.


Gordon Edward Taylor: Tell the whole story.


John (Moody) Roberts: Subsequent to that, the Chamber of Commerce in the area sent telegrams supporting the proposal to the Government.
There has been a flow of a variety of coupons-I do not know the exact number, but certainly a large number-which have expressed concern about this transaction on environmental grounds. I have already indicated in past answers to the House that there was an environmental review which found that there was no significant environmental detriment from the project.
The Hon. Member's second question concerns the selfgovernment status of Banff as a park site. I can inform him that in that regard, in conjunction with the Province of Alberta, I was prepared to put to the residents of the area the question of whether they wished to have Banff incorporated as an appropriate townsite under the municipal legislation of Alberta. The decision of the committee of the town which considered that suggestion was that it did not wish to proceed with the matter as a referendum to the people of the area.
I am afraid by the time I reached the end of the second answer, I forgot what the Hon. Member's third question was. I will respond, if he asks it again.

November 23, 1982
Oral Questions


AUTHORITY FOR ACTION-OFFICIAL'S RESIGNATION
John Allen Fraser: Madam Speaker, perhaps I can help the Minister. My last question was, who is running Parks Canada, and perhaps the Minister will answer that in a moment.
In view of the fact that 1,200 people objected recently, as I understand it, how can the Minister say that because there was no objection to this a decade ago, somehow or other it is all right? People suddently realized what was going to happen. In view of all the development that has taken place over the last ten years, why did the Minister just go ahead and do this? Surely, when there is such a significant amount of opposition, the Minister has the responsibility to consult with his officials and, if necessary, go to the site and discuss the matter with the people concerned?
My last question ties in with the others. How does the Minister explain one of his officials being so dismayed at what has gone on that he has resigned, making very vituperative comments about the way the whole thing was done?
I come back to the last question again; just who is running the situation?


John (Moody) Roberts: Madam Speaker, perhaps the Hon. Member did not hear clearly or fully the response I gave earlier, that is, that not only was there consultation which took place ten years ago in 1972, but again the population of the area was consulted in 1980 over the zoning of that spot. Thus it is not a consultation which simply took place ten years ago. There has been consultation at a much more recent date than that.
Again I refer the Hon. Member to the telegram which we received indicating the support of the Chamber of Commerce for the proposal. The point the hon. gentleman raised about the resignation of an official is one which I am afraid I cannot answer because I am not aware of his resignation, nor am I aware, as the Hon. Member seems to be, of a statement which was made at that time. Of course I will look into it now that he has drawn it to my attention.
The answer to his third question is still as it was when he was minister, that the Minister responsible for Parks Canada is the Minister of the Environment.


FOREIGN INVESTMENT REVIEW AGENCY STUDY OF TORONTO APARTMENT SALES DEAL
Mr. Ian Deans (Hamilton Mountain):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce. Last week the Minister indicated that he would take whatever steps he could to determine the real owners in the recent apartment building transaction which occurred in Metropolitan Toronto, and that he would, if possible, have FIRA review it to determine whether there was any aspect of
it that would yield significant benefit to Canada. It has now become apparent that this is not the only transaction being undertaken by foreign purchasers of apartment buildings across the country. Has the Minister conducted his review? Will he have FIRA review, it and, if so, when will the review begin?


Hon. Ed Lumley (Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce and Minister of Regional Economic Expansion):: Madam Speaker, my officials talked to the solicitors of the various parties involved in the transactions last week. There is another meeting which will be held tomorrow. At the present time the case is still under study by the Agency.


Ian Deans: We all know the Minister's reluctance to support FIRA in the first place, shared incidentally by the Conservatives.


AGENCY'S MANDATE
Ian Deans: Madam Speaker, I am curious to know what is it that takes so long. What is it that requires a week and a half of study to determine, first, whether or not there indeed are foreign investors taking over apartment buildings in Canada and thereby forcing higher rents on Canadians? Second, is it within FIR As mandate to investigate it and, if so, why has it not started?


Edward C. Lumley: Madam Speaker, with respect to the premise of the Hon. Member's question, on the contrary, I fully support FIRA. Despite the fact that I am one who supports the free enterprise system and one who supports that "profit" is not a dirty word, if the transactions as alleged in this case are indeed correct, I think the free market system is substantially undermined by transactions of this nature. However, the fact of the matter is that with respect to this case, it has not yet been decided as to whether it is reviewable under FIRA. We must abide by the law.


COMMUNICATIONS
Miss Aideen Nicholson (Trinity):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Communications. It concerns Bell Canada's proposed credit-screening system under which new subscribers may be required to pay substantial amounts to Bell Canada before having telephones installed. In view of the fact that this proposal will primarily affect lower income Canadians, including families with young children, single parents, and senior citizens for whom the telephone is a very vital communications link, would the Minister tell the House whether he has had any discussion


Ian Deans: What is taking so long?
November 23, 1982

with Bell Canada regarding modifications to the proposal which, in its present form, will deny telephone service to those who need it most?


Hon. Francis Fox (Minister of Communications):: Madam Speaker, I thank the Hon. Member for giving me notice of her question earlier today. Indeed I would be very pleased to raise the matter with Bell Canada. However, 1 would point out that there is a problem which the company must face, in that in the last year some 180,000 residential customers were disconnected for non-payment, and some 7,700 of these disconnections were permanent. Be that as it may, I will raise the issue with the management of Bell Canada in view of the very real importance of the question raised by the Hon. Member.


AIR TRANSPORT
Hon. Roch La Salle (Joliette):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Transport. Considering his decision regarding Quebecair, I would like to recall, Madam Speaker, that the Minister's attitude and proposal have aroused the consternation if not the disgust of thousands of Quebecers. Considering the fact that the Minister has achieved one goal, which is to kill Quebecair, could the minister inform us whether he has the unanimous support of the Liberal Members from Quebec for a decision that has put an end to Quebecair's activities? 1 would also like to ask the minister whether he is proud of the dirty work he accomplished yesterday.


Hon. Jean-Luc Pepin (Minister of Transport):: Madam Speaker, I am very surprised at my hon. friend's consternation. In fact, this is not at all the impression I received this morning, especially from the press. If we really wanted to kill Quebecair, we are certainly going about it in a very clumsy way, by asking Air Canada to help reorganize that airline. Therefore, 1 think that my hon. friend is merely stating his own personal opinion.


INQUIRY WHY GOVERNMENT DID NOT ENSURE VIABILITY OF QUEBECAIR
Roch La Salle: Madam Speaker, since during the past year alone, this government has helped various companies that were in financial difficulty, and since the minister, even in his new proposal, mentioned that he wants to rationalize air services, I would like to know why the minister has not offered Quebecair enough routes to ensure its profitability and viability? In the circumstances, I have the impression that the minister has no wish to ensure Quebecair's
Oral Questions
survival and is making a proposal which is my view is obscene, Madam Speaker.


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, I could not care less what the Hon. Member's impressions are of this proposal. As for reorganizing routes, if the Hon. Member would read the text I released to the press yesterday, he would see that it is an essential element of our present proposal. At my press conference I also said that Air Canada's routes were the first to be open to negotiation. If that is not a way to help Quebecair achieve its objectives, I wonder what is.


Roch La Salle: What about Quebecair 1? What is the difference?


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, well, what about Quebecair 1? One of the issues that is probably troubling my hon. friend is that yesterday, I refused, on behalf of the government, to take up all the commitments, debts and contracts Quebecair had made in the past. Why we did that? If we had not, thereby taking on the entire past history of Quebecair, we would have sabotaged any chance of success we might have. That is why we have refused to take over Quebecair's debts.
Madam Speaker, we are really trying to do a good job here. In general, reactions from the Quebec side are favourable. There are further details, and I am willing to discuss these if the Hon. Member is prepared to ask me some specific questions.


FUTURE OF NORDAIR
Mr. Geoff Scott (Hamilton-Wentworth):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Transport. Will he now tell the House what the future holds for Nordair? What is the status of the Minister's desire to merge Nordair with Quebecair, or will he now do it under the aegis of Air Canada?


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, the big project that we had in mind, the merger of Nordair and Quebecair, involved the presence of Air Canada. The reason for this is not simply the liking I have for the company or the fact that I am responsible to the House for it. Most people realize that Air Canada has an important role to play in the rationalization of air transportation in the central part of the country. Most people accept that, and this is why I have always thought that Air Canada should play the role of catalyst. What is the future of Nordair following the announcement 1 made yesterday? There is no change with respect to Nordair; it will continue as it is now.


Geoffrey Douglas Scott: Madam Speaker, I think that answer will be interpreted to mean that a merger between Nordair and Quebecair will be taking place. This is one of the underlying worries on the part of Nordair employees which is contributing to the length of the Nordair strike.

November 23, 1982
Oral Questions


LABOUR CONDITIONS
Geoffrey Douglas Scott: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question is directed to the Minister of Labour. How much longer does the Government intend to let the Nordair strike drag on? Will those airplanes be back in the skies on the East-West passenger routes before Christmas, or could the strike drag on until next April or May, as I have heard speculated?


Hon.   Chas. L. Caccia@Minister of Labour: Madam Speaker, this strike, which of course is of great concern to the Government, could be ended in a very short period of time if both parties were willing to sit at the bargaining table and seriously mediate their dispute. The latest attempt took place on November 15. Unfortunately the meeting broke off within a matter of a few minutes, if not hours.
As I said last Friday, we are standing by to offer mediation services at any time or moment, as soon as the two parties indicate to us that they are seriously committed to resuming negotiations.


CORPORATE AFFAIRS
Ms. Lynn McDonald (Broadview-Greenwood):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, the sponsor of Bill S-31. Last Friday, the President of the Montreal Stock Exchange, Mr. Pierre Lortie, stated that a bill similar to Bill S-31 had been introduced at a meeting of representatives of Canadian stock exchanges. Is this proposal really behind Bill S-31 ?


Hon. Andre Ouellet (Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs):: No, Madam Speaker.


INQUIRY WHY GOVERNMENT DID NOT IMPLEMENT BUSINESS REQUESTS
Lynn McDonald: Madam Speaker, my second question is for the same minister. According to Mr. Lortie, a few months ago, the minister refused to act on the requests of the business community in this area. Why has he changed his mind since then? Have other pressures been exerted? If so, by whom?


André Ouellet: Madam Speaker, I thank the Hon. Member for giving me the opportunity to say that these are two different matters, in fact, the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs has been considering for some time the possibility of introducing a bill on securities. This has been very badly received by provincial authorities that have traditionally held
this field of jurisdiction for many years, while it could very well be held by the Canadian government. I have said that we would like investment corporations coming under provincial jurisdiction to abide by the laws of the market. One provincial corporation in particular, the Caisse de depot et de placement du Quebec, does not follow the rules for securities, which has caused problems with securities in Ontario and has prompted my department to ask the Superior Court for an injunction to force it to make its intentions known. The Hon. Members will know that this matter is still before the courts since we have appealed a first ruling of the Court of first instance. On the other hand, in order to protect the interests of the Canadian Government as concerns interprovincial and international transport, we have introduced Bill S-31 which requires that all provincial financial institutions coming under provincial jurisdiction follow certain rules and prevents them from purchasing more than 10 per cent of the shares in interprovincial and international transport companies.


AIR TRANSPORT
Mr. Maurice A. Dionne (Northumberland-Miramichi):: Madam Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the Minister of Transport. The Hon. Member for Hamilton-Wentworth implied that the Minister's answer suggested a merger between Nordair and Quebecair. I understood exactly the opposite. Would the Minister clarify the situation so that both the Hon. Member for Hamilton-Wentworth and I will know who is either deaf or obtuse?


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, this is exactly it. My hon. colleague speaks with the wisdom that he is well known to possess. The way to interpret it is that the Government is taking the Quebecair only approach. This should be the understanding. I thank my hon. colleague for expressing the common sense of the population in this matter.


FINANCE
Mr. Bill McKnight (Kindersley-Lloydminster):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance. As reported in Hansard on March 19, 1982, his predecessor stated in reply to a question from my colleague, the Hon. Member for Don Valley West in regard to imputing an income to a home owner:

November 23, 1982

I have attempted to allay the concern by stating categorically that the Government never had any intention, does not presently entertain any intention, nor will it entertain an intention in the future to tax imputed rent. That is the end of the matter as far as 1 am concerned.
Has there been a change in the direction of Government policy as a result of the change in Ministers, or is that still the publicly stated policy of the Government?


Hon. Marc Lalonde (Minister of Finance):: Madam Speaker, it is both the publicly stated policy and the policy which has not been stated publicly. The issue raised by the Hon. Member was raised as a scare tactic previously by, 1 believe, an irresponsible insurance company in particular, and it had no foundation at that time and no foundation ever since.


ASSESSMENT IN CASE OF SASKATCHEWAN FARMER
William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, 1 am not sure about any irresponsible insurance company, but 1 think the Minister is being irresponsible in his answer to the question because, right now, in my constituency, there is an incorporated farmer who has been assessed $9,000 imputed income from rental on a $75,000 home. Why is the Minister standing in the House to say that the Government does not intend to impute rent or impute income to Canadians who wish to shelter themselves and provide housing? Why is the Minister not coming clean and telling us that the Government will raise funds by imputing rent and income to individual Canadians?


Marc Lalonde: Madam Speaker, I suspect that the Hon. Member does not adequately or appropriately represent the individual case to which he refers. If he wishes to bring the details to my attention, or to the attention of the Department of National Revenue, I am sure they will be very happy to look into it.
The role of the Department of National Revenue is to apply the law as passed by this Parliament. The laws are in the books for everyone to see. That is what the Department of National Revenue is called upon to apply. I suggest to my hon. friend that if he has a specific income tax case that he is concerned about, either he or his constituent can raise it with the Minister of National Revenue. It will be examined and dealt with appropriately under the laws of the land.


AIRPORTS
Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Madam Speaker, some months ago the Minister of Transport told the House, on the important matter of duty-free administration, that the Government had learned something from the Sky Shops fiasco. In view of the recent mess caused by Sky Shops' successors, Thomcor, at Mirabel and Dorval, where they left the Canadian taxpayers or his Department holding the bag with about $6 million in bad debts plus a few hundred thousand dollars worth
Petitions
of missing liquor, and in view of the terrible mess in Toronto which the Minister is aware of, where administrative neglect at the La Belle Creole duty-free shop has cost the taxpayers at least $10 million more, when will the Minister get his act together to administer this potentially lucrative business properly? I ask him, very respectfully, if he will be good enough to tell the House what improvements he will make to remedy this situation which has cost the Canadian taxpayers nearly $20 million in these two instances alone.


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, my Department is human. Occasionally, mistakes are made. Occasionally, the people who operate these facilities in the airports encounter difficulties that were not anticipated. For example, the economic situation at this particular moment is creating problems for many. I agree that there are, indeed, problems, and we do our best to correct them.


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: I say to the Minister, very respectfully, that perhaps the problem is that the Minister is not following his own financial criteria in administering duty-free concessions.


APPLICATION OF TENDERING POLICY
Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Madam Speaker, the Minister must know that the tendering process traditionally calls for both percentage and minimum guarantees. He now appears to be fixing the percentages and allowing the minimum guarantees to float, contrary to his own policy. Had he followed the policy of his predecessor, the Hon. Member for Vegreville, and awarded that franchise in Toronto to the highest bidder, as should have been done, the Canadian taxpayers would have been $10 million ahead of the game.


Jean-Luc Pepin: Madam Speaker, we do practise the double standard with the minimum guarantee and-


An Hon. Member:: A double standard?


Jean-Luc Pepin: 
PETITIONS
Madam Speaker:: I have the honour to inform the House that the Clerk of the House has laid upon the Table reports of the Clerk of Petitions stating that he has examined the petitions presented by Hon. Members on Friday, November 19, 1982, and finds that the petitions meet the requirements of the Standing Orders as to form.

November 23, 1982
Order Paper Questions



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Mr. Jim Peterson (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State for Economic Development and Minister of State for Science and Technology):: Madam Speaker, I have the honour of tabling the Nineteenth Report of the Standing Committee on Finance, Trade and Economic Affairs.
[Editor's note: For above report, see today's Votes and Proceedings.]


CRIMINAL CODE
Arnold John Malone: for leave to introduce Bill C-664, an Act to amend the Criminal Code (profits of crime).
He said: Madam Speaker, this legislation is timely, although it was in preparation for some time, because it fits precisely within the framework of the comments recently made by the Hon. Member for Annapolis Valley-Hants (Mr. Nowlan) in that any criminal who is charged would not be able to profit from crime. The legislation also takes into consideration the concerns raised by the Minister of Justice (Mr. MacGuigan) who asked a question about freedom of speech, because it would still allow people to speak, to write and to publish. The Bill provides simply that all profits from any materials would be taxed 100 per cent and would go to a trust fund for victims of crime.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.

[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Madam Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 3,671, 4,078, 4,079 and 4,494.


Mr. Stevens: What is the total financial assistance that the Government has given to Consolidated Computer Inc. in terms of (a) loans (b) loan guarantees (c) grants
(d) letters of comfort and what does the Government anticipate it will be able to salvage out of the sale of CCI to Nabu Manufacturing Corporation?


Edward C. Lumley: As of
January 25, 1982, the reply for the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce is as follows:
(a)	Total loans extended were $12.9 million. Of this amount $.5 million was repaid and the balance was converted into common shares of the company.
(b)	Total loan guarantees authorized amounted to $150.7 million. Of this amount the Crown was required to disburse a net amount of $96 million.
(c)	Total contributions were $10.4 million.
(d)	No letters of comfort have been issued.
Based on the business plan presented by Nabu Manufacturing Corporation, the Government anticipates a recovery of approximately $7.6 million during the five years following the sale of the Company.


[Stage Direction]
1.	Did the Government place Mr. Harold Melanson as a Director of Financeco and allow him at the same time to be a Director and Officer of Consolidated Computers Inc. and, if so, for what reason?
2.	Did Mr. Melanson instruct Coopers and Lybrand, Chartered Accountants in Toronto, as auditors of Financeco at the same time as he instructed Coopers and Lybrand, as auditors of Consolidated Computers?
3.	Did Financeco at any time have any employees to do any of its own bookkeeping or accounting or did it rely solely on the work done by Thorne Riddell and Company, through the partners assigned to the company to act as directors of the company, those being Messrs. Wright and Taylor?
4.	What were the fees paid to Thorne Riddell for acting on behalf of Financeco in the year (a) 1976 (b) 1977 (c) 1978 (d) 1979 (e) 1980 (0 1981 ?
5.	Did Consolidated Computers Incorporated use its personnel to handle all the receipts of rents and the deposits of money for and on behalf of Financeco Limited and Finecomp Incorporated and to act as bookkeepers and agents for both companies?
6.	What undertakings did the officers of Consolidated Computers Inc. give to Messrs. Cooper and Lybrand to indicate that Consolidated Computers Inc. had no financial interest in Financeco and Finecomp?
Edward C. Lumley: As of
February 25, 1982, the reply for the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce is as follows:
1.	No. Mr. Melanson was a director of Financeco until July, 1980. He resigned when he was appointed Executive VicePresident of Consolidated Computer.
2.	No. By the time Mr. Melanson was appointed Executive Vice-President of Consolidated Computer, Coopers and Lybrand were no longer that company's auditors.


Mr. Blenkarn: November 23, 1982

3.	Financeco relied solely on the services of Thorne Riddell for its accounting needs.
4.	Fees paid to Thorne Riddell for administration, accounting and preparation of tax returns:
Year	
1976	$ 48,906
1977	94,566
1978	116,229
1979	142,646
1980	179,711
1981	230,245
5.	Consolidated Computer collected lease revenue on behalf of Financeco and Finecomp which was immediately turned over to the respective companies. Consolidated Computer did not act as bookkeeper or agent for either company.
6.	No undertakings were provided beyond the normal letter of representations provided by management to external auditors. From 1976 to mid-1979 Coopers and Lybrand were auditors of all three companies and were able to verify that Consolidated Computer had no financial interest in Financeco and Finecomp.


Mr. Blenkarn: 1.	What percentage of the shares of Consolidated Computer Incorporated were held by the public and not by the Government, the Government of Ontario or Fujitsu of Japan in the year (a) 1974 (b) 1975 (c) 1976 (d) 1977 (e) 1978 (f) 1979 (q) 1980 (h) 1981 (/) 1982 to January 30?
2.	In accordance with the agreement between Her Majesty the Queen and Nabu Manufacturing Corporation and others with the Government, did the Government agree to pay off the total bank indebtedness owed by Financeco and its subsidiary Finecomp leaving those companies with all of their assets but with none of their outstanding liabilities?
3.	On January 30, 1982, what were the net assets of Financeco and Finecomp after payment of the outstanding amount to banks and bankers who had invested in Financeco by notes and debentures?
4.	Does the Government have and will it supply an audited financial statement of Financeco and Finecomp for the period ending January 30, 1982 or, if this is not available, for the period ending December 31, 1981?
5.	Did someone on behalf of the Government or did the Government through the Enterprise Development Board prepare an estimated cash flow coming to Financeco and Finecomp from outstanding lease obligations owed to those companies?
6.	Is there a Declaration of Trust wherein the National Trust Company declared it held the one share in Financeco Limited on behalf of the Sick Children's Hospital of Toronto, the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and, if so, will the Government produce a copy of the Declaration?
7.	Did the hospitals understand that they were the beneficial owners of Financeco Limited and its subsidiaries in 1976 and, if so, on what date did the hospitals realize this?
8.	Did the Government pay a certain amount to the hospitals to have them divest of the beneficial ownership of Financeco Limited in order to effect the agreement between Her Majesty the Queen and Nabu Manufacturing Corporation and others dated November 26, 1981 and, if so, what was the amount?


Edward C. Lumley: As of
February 25, 1982, the reply for the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce is as follows:
Order Paper Questions
1.	Percentages of issued shares of CCI held by the public:
As at	Per Cent
December 31, 1974	57.2
December 31, 1975	57.2
December 31, 1976	12.4
December 31, 1977	12.4
December 31, 1978	12.4
December 31, 1979	12.1
December 31, 1980	12.1
December 31, 1981	12.1
January 30, 1982	12.1
2.	No. The Government of Canada purchased the total bank's indebtedness owed by both Financeco and Finecomp from the lenders to the two companies for a total of about $43.2 million. Of that amount, the Crown is now owed about $20.4 million by Financeco plus about $8.2 million by Finecomp, and is to be partially repaid out of future cash flow of the two companies over the five years ending December 31, 1986.
3 and 4. January 30, 1982 financial statements of Financeco and Finecomp will not be prepared. Unaudited December 31, 1981 financial statement reveal that Financeco had consolidated negative net assets of nearly $28 million at that date.
5.	Estimates of cash flow coming to Financeco and Finecomp from their outstanding leases were prepared on behalf of the Enterprise Development Board, (or its predecessor, the General Adjustment Assistance Board), at various times over the past several years.
6.	The only issued share of Financeco was held (until late in 1981), by National Trust Company Limited. Both Financeco and Finecomp were set up in such a manner that all foreseen cash flow would be used to repay loans insured by the Enterprise Development Board, with any residual funds accruing to Consolidated Computer in the form of agreed collection fees. Because there existed a remote possibility that excess cash flow could be generated, the General Adjustment Assistance Board (GAAB) concluded that any such windfall benefits should accrue to charitable organizations and an agreement was entered into on June 15, 1976 to establish this arrangement.
7.	Because no excess flow was generated by Financeco, there was never any distribution of funds to the charitable organizations. It is unlikely that they realized they might have benefited as a result of the June 15, 1976 agreement.
8.	The Government of Canada paid $600 to National Trust Company, Limited to acquire the single share of Financeco.


Mr. Siddon: 1.	What is the total annual budget for the Department of Supply and Services' "Canada Service Bureau" office in Vancouver?
2.	What portion of the budget is for (a) staff salaries and benefits (b) office rental (c) advertising and promotion?
3.	How many "Canada Service Bureau" offices does the Department operate in Canada?

November 23, 1982
Order Paper Questions


Hon.   J.-J. Blais@Minister of Supply and Services: 1.


[Stage Direction]
2.	(a) $89,546. (b) Space rental is a DPW responsibility and that Department reports the total cost at $30,706.40. (c) There is no regional breakdown of advertising costs available. The national program for all initiatives was $400,000 for 1982-83.
3.	There are Service Bureaux in 14 major Canadian cities and eight mobile or itinerant services serving an additional 75 cities and towns.
James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Madam Speaker, 1 ask that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


Madam Speaker:: The questions enumerated by the Parliamentary Secretary have been answered.


Mr. Siddon:: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the Parliamentary Secretary for answering question No. 4,494 which 1 placed on the Order Paper on October 27. Could the Parliamentary Secretary tell me what has happened to question No. 4,053 which I placed on the Order Paper nine months ago? It deals with the shipment of Canadian uranium through the Soviet Union for reprocessing, and possible security aspects arising from the possibility that some by-products of this uranimum could be used for nuclear weapons. I wonder if the Parliamentary Secretary might give an undertaking to answer that question at the most immediate opportunity.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: I would be very pleased to give an undertaking to have this question answered at the very earliest opportunity. Within this context, 1 think it is important to point out to the House, however, that to date-


Erik Nielsen: We heard that yesterday.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: -we have answered 3,788 questions during this session, which is 83.1 per cent of all of the questions asked by Hon. Members opposite.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: I am very proud of the record on this side of the House.


Madam Speaker:: Shall the remaining questions be allowed to stand?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS

[Stage Direction]
BUSINESS OF SUPPLY ALLOTTED DAY, S O. 58-CANADA POST CORPORATION Mr. Bud Bradley (Haldimand-Norfolk) moved:
That this House, recognizing the importance of providing efficient, affordable, equitable mail service to all Canadians, and recognizing that Canada Post has reduced service while increasing its rates, condemns the Government for its failure to enforce the provisions of the Canada Post Corporation Act which require Canada Post to provide Canadians with adequate service at a reasonable cost.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I found it necessary to move such a motion and to speak to it because of the great concern felt by Hon. Members in my party and, I am sure, by those to our left for individual Canadians, Canadian charitable organizations, businesses and major corporations. Contrary to the beliefs of some Hon. Members opposite, we even have concern for the Canada Post Corporation. What is happening to the mail service in Canada is of great concern to those of us in the Progressive Conservative Party.
Let us look at the history of the Canada Post Corporation so that we will know where it came from. It was established in this House through the committee process to provide an adequate service at a reasonable cost. Its goal, to quote Mr. Warren and some of his executives, was to improve the postal service in this country. The Act which went through the House forming the Canada Post Corporation was agreed to by all parties of this House. All parties felt the need to remove this monster from the Department and the Government, and the need to form a new Crown corporation to handle the postal service in this country. We stand by our agreement today.
The definition of the term "letter" was not defined in the Act. It was also agreed by all parties in the House that that power would be given to the Canada Post Corporation to define what was mailable matter, what was not mailable matter, and what was a letter. The process agreed upon was that this definition would be arrived at by the Corporation. It would be placed in the Canada Gazette for an acceptable period and letters of representation from Canadians, organizations and businesses would be considered for a reasonable time so that amendments could be made and then referred to Governor in Council, and a final definition approved.
The rates for postal matters in Canada were also dealt with under the same format. It would be within the power of the Canada Post Corporation to determine what it felt was a reasonable rate in order to maintain the services of the post office in Canada. The procedure was the same. The rates would be gazetted, there would be a reasonable time in which to make representation and make amendments if necessary, and then a final decision would be reached by the Governor in Council.
That seems to be where the agreement between those of us on this side of the House and those on the opposite side ends. Certainly it is now a Crown corporation and it is being run as a
November 23, 1982
[Stage Direction]
business. However, the Government of Canada must accept its responsibility as far as the post office and the country is concerned.
1 do not think I must remind too many Hon. Members opposite that the sum of $660 million of taxpayers' money is going to the Crown corporation this year to assist it in its operation. It is not attaining its goal to provide adequate service at reasonable cost.
What has happened to the Corporation this year, in which it has been a fledgling? First, the rates were increased some 76 per cent to 30 cents for first-class mail, which was totally unacceptable after such a devastating strike just prior to the increase, devastating not only to individuals and organizations but most certainly to small businesses in this country, sounding the death-knell for many of them.
The definition of "letter" was brought forth, and it was an unbelievable definition. Saturday rural mail has been stopped in all but Prince Edward Island, where the question is now being studied. Christmas card rates were brought up to the first-class rate of 30 cents, devastating to the card manufacturers and to people who send cards, but with a promise that the situation may change next year. If the promise that it may change next year is there, why not this year? Then there is our final rate increase, an additional 6 per cent, in line with the six and five program, to 32 cents. That represents an increase in the past year or so of some 82 per cent in postal rates. What private enterprise has been allowed to increase their rates some 82 per cent?
What is next for our Corporation? There is discussion of Saturday wicket closings in the post offices. There is talk about lay-offs of post office staff and there is discussion about reducing letter carrier routes and even the closure of some small post offices throughout the country.
What we have, Mr. Speaker, is less service at more cost. That is not acceptable to this Party. We have called for review of the Canada Post Corporation many times. We have called for it in the House of Commons, in the press and in letters. I have asked the Minister responsible for the Corporation about it in the House; I have asked the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) and I have even asked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, trying to get someone to give an indication that this question would be referred to a Committee of the House to be discussed and considered, but to no avail.
I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister and perhaps I could read it into the record. I did not make it public and I did not release it to the Press. Because of the Prime Minister's concern and request for co-operation within the Parties, 1 felt that a letter directly to him with copies to the Minister and the President of the Corporation would be of some assistance and possibly get something done for us. I wrote as follows:
The Right Hon. Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, P.C., M.P.
Sir:
You may recall that on July 30th, 1982 I requested a study of the problems facing the Canada Post Corporation by a Committee of the House.
Mr. Warren has stated that the Corporation will be staying within the six and five per cent guidelines as far as an increase in rates is concerned. I feel this is a
Supply
very commendable and responsible stand. However, since only wage costs are controlled under the six and five per cent guidelines, major costs of vehicles, vehicle maintenance, fuel, building maintenance, etc. will undoubtedly exceed 6 per cent, resulting in costs which surpass income.
This situation will most certainly place considerable stress on Mr. Warren and his attempts to streamline the Corporation and improve efficiency. As well, he has the responsibility of reducing the post office deficit by some $260 million in a limited period of time. It would appear to me that when costs outstrip income, at a time when it is mandatory to decrease a huge deficit, there is no alternative but to reduce service. Reductions in service as initiated by the Corporation in recent weeks, and which will no doubt continue in the months to come, can only be accomplished at the expense of the customers.
Possibly we are asking too much to expect Mr. Warren to reduce his deficit so greatly during such difficult economic times. Perhaps consideration could be given to allowing an extension of the time table for the reduction of the deficit.
I am very concerned that in order to meet his deadline Mr. Warren will be forced to cause irreparable damage to the operation of the system, and also create hardships to customers and workers alike.
I would greatly appreciate it if serious consideration could be given to this matter.
I received a response and I would like to read that into the record:
Dr. T.A. Bradley, M.P.
Dear Dr. Bradley:
On behalf of the Prime Minister, I am writing to acknowledge receipt of your letter of September 13.
Please be assured that it will be brought to Mr. Trudeau's attention.
1 would have thought that a letter on a serious note to the Prime Minister of this country would have warranted a serious reply.
What has happened to this postal service and why has it happened? The deadline given to Mr. Warren when he took the job was that he was to reduce the deficit from some $660 million a year to zero within a time span of some four years, a totally impossible task. How many other Crown corporations are required to become self-sufficient in four years, or at all, of the some hundreds of Crown corporations owned by the Government of Canada? Could we consider the CNR or Air Canada or the CBC? If we look at each of those in turn, they are set up and established, as the post office was, to supply a service to all of the country, possibly subsidized if sufficient funds were not available. The CNR provides service to the north, to the east and to the west, with small branch lines throughout the Prairies, usually at a loss and usually subsidized. Air Canada provides service to the north, east and west and to the small strips, and quite often is subsidized. The CBC offers good programming and good listening to the areas of the north and all reaches of Canada, and it is certainly subsidized. Why not Canada Post?
It is the obligation of this Government to provide good postal service to Yukon, to Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, to Corner Brook, Newfoundland. It is a responsibility and if it needs to be subsidized it should be subsidized. That is what Canada is about. That is what federalism is about. This is a great country, we should ensure that we work together with the Provinces in all areas to provide adequate service at reasonable cost.
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November 23, 1982
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If this $660 million reduction were to be removed from our national debt and it could be shown that it was removed from the debt, possibly the argument would not be so strong. Possibly Canadians could accept the extra cost, knowing that they are helping; but this is not going to happen. The Government would squander the money somewhere else, possibly buying licorice cigarettes for the Minister of National Health and Welfare (Miss Begin).
What position has Mr. Warren been placed in in this fiscal year? He has a necessary reduction of some $260 million from his deficit; that amount must be trimmed this year. He has now been placed under six and five, in a very difficult economic time, where he has income of 6 per cent and most certainly expenses far in excess of the 6 per cent, possibly in the 12 per cent range.
What can he do, or, better than that, what must he do? What is he forced to do? He is forced to increase the rates, first to 30 cents, then to 32 cents. Why? Very obviously, to bring in money to reduce that deficit, to try to maintain the service that the Corporation has been providing. He has had to bring in a definition of a letter that is so tight, giving the Corporation such strict control over the volume of mail. Why? It was to bring in money and to improve the mail volume that has dropped off since the last mail strike and since the 30-cent stamp was brought in. He has had to reduce and in fact cut out Saturday rural delivery in order to cut the contracts of the rural carriers and save money. He has put Christmas cards at the first-class rate of 30 cents in order to glean an extra 10 or 15 cents a card to try to bail himself out of the pit. He is now looking at Saturday wicket closures, lay-offs, a reduction in letter carrier routes and the closure of small post offices in order to save wages, overtime and rental.
He is forced to do this in order to reach a goal that was set unrealistically by the Government in accordance with the Act passed by all parties in this House, but not with acceptance of that goal by all parties. It is being done with a reduction in service to the user of the post office. The rate increase was opposed by tens of thousands of individuals and businesses. That rate increase was soon after a postal strike which was devastating.
The definition of a letter is opposed by municipalities across this country such as Kitchener. Municipalities are being forced to deliver their municipal bills by Canada Post because of legislation by Order in Council.
Are we right? Are we as a Parliament right in telling the municipality which sends out municipal bills to municipal residents within the boundaries of that municipality for municipal goods provided by municipal staff that they must send those municipal bills to their municipal residents for municipal goods through Canada Post? We should take a long look at that because we are in the situation of forcing municipalities to increase their taxes to pay the extra cost for something they are being forced to do. The definition is being
protested by charitable and non-profit organizations. First they opposed the stamp and then the definition.
Today I received two letters which are an example of that opposition. One was from Capreol dated November 16. I suppose seven days for delivery of these is acceptable. I quote from the letter:
The proposed postal legislation, as described in The Citizen, November 6, 1982, page 21, will cause great financial hardship to the charitable organization to which I volunteer my time, La Leche League. We depend on being able to group various pieces of correspondence into one packet of first-class mail in order to carry on many aspects of our activities.
I feel sure that other non-profit organizations, such as La Leche League, will also be hurt, and that administrators in these organizations simply are not aware of the implications of the proposed legislation for them.
I have expressed my concern to the Hon. Andre Ouellet and to my own Member of Parliament. 1 appeal now to you, as the Post Office critic for the Progressive Conservative Party, to use any influence you can to make the situation known to the public who will be affected through the volunteer organizations which they support, and to have the legislation withdrawn because of its unfairness.
I was handed another letter by the Hon. Member for Winnipeg-Assiniboine (Mr. McKenzie). 1 quote:
Dear Sir:
I am strongly opposed to the new Canada Post definition of a letter. I hope you can dissuade them from putting this definition into effect.
Rose Ryan.
Those are but two examples of hundreds of letters received from individuals, charitable organizations, businesses and companies throughout this country. There are over 300 businesses and corporations that oppose this definition. I wish to bring a couple to the attention of the House. In its letter to the Minister, The Canadian Bankers' Association said in part:
In our opinion, the task of properly defining the term "letter" and the scope of the Corporation's monopoly are of sufficient importance to justify careful consideration on the part of the Canadian public and corporate communities. We request that the Government consider the development of a special task force, or parliamentary committee to study the regulations, and the responses of interested parties, in order to satisfy the concerns that we feel and that we understand have been expressed by other interested persons concerning the effect that these regulations will have upon business and public interests in Canada.
I wish to quote from an article headed "Definition of letter held threat to small couriers":
General Motors Co. of Canada Ltd., Oshawa, Ont., uses private courier companies to move inter-office correspondence. The company has estimated that if the new definition becomes law, it would cost $3 million more a year to finance the system GM now has in place-
That $3 million is what it would cost General Motors to provide the same service being done internally. The couriers now carrying out this work would be unemployed. The money would not go to Canada Post because it does not have the facilities to provide the service required by General Motors. This would not only put men working in the courier system out
Thank you for any help you can give.
Yours truly,
Patricia Fraser.
Dear Sir:
Sincerely,
November 23, 1982
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of work, but would be absorbed internally by General Motors. Canada Post would not receive any part of the $3 million.
These definitions were brought in in a package. Some amendments were then added. We now understand there are going to be more amendments, one to cover General Motors and one to cover security clearance. Still, an ad hoc committee has been formed to opppose this; these amendments are being opposed. Some of the members of the ad hoc committee which was formed on October 18 are as follows: the Consumers' Association of Canada, Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Canadian Depository for Securities Limited, the Retail Council of Canada, the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, the Canadian Bankers' Association, Conseil du Patronat du Quebec, the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the financial Executives Institute of Canada, the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the Association of Canadian Financial Corporations, the Direct Sellers Association, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Automobile Parts Manufacturers' Association. I quote in part from their brief. They-
-request that the Governor in Council refuse to approve the proposed "letter" regulation and submit it to the Privy Council, in order to allow a constructive dialogue among interested consumer and business organizations, the Post Corporation and the Government.
These are not small organizations. They oppose the definition. The definition of "letter" is like the Liberal budget brought down on June 28 by the Minister from Cape Breton Island. You throw as much into the boat as you can, shove it out in the water and check the waves. If the waves come over the gunwales, you throw some back. If more waves come over the gunwales, you throw more back. When the waves stop coming over the gunwales, you let it float. That is similar to what we have had happen with the definition of "letter".
We are told, Mr. Speaker, that this definition will not come into effect until April, 1983 so that business can adapt to the regulations that it sets out. If this is being put forward to April, 1983 so that business can adapt, obviously the Minister and the Corporation are aware of the problems this will bring to small business. That alone is sufficient reason to refer this definition to a special committee of this House so that we can hear from small business and these other organizations, and from individuals and charitable groups.
Taking away the facilities of Saturday rural delivery is opposed, Mr. Speaker. The Christmas card rate is opposed, not only by the card manufacturers of Canada and North America, but also by the individuals who send those cards to friends. Saturday wicket closing will be opposed. Rural people who work their farms come in to town on Saturdays to do their shopping and to pick up registered letters and parcels, notification of which they received during the week. There are the individuals who work in a large community and live in a small one, who are not in their community during the day and who need the Saturday wicket service to pick up their letters and parcels. People working in one part of a major centre such as
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Toronto or Montreal but living in another part utilize Saturdays to pick up their registered letters and parcels.
Lay-offs will be opposed, as well as the reduction of letter carrier routes and the closure of some small post offices; and if one needs reinforcement of that, one could ask Mr. McGarry or Mr. Parrot as to the extent of the opposition to such a reduction of service. We on this side of the House are not saying that if we were still the Government we would not have given the same power and approved the same definition or thought the same rates to be necessary as this Government has, Mr. Speaker. But we feel that we would have had the foresight and the courage to say that possibly these things should be reconsidered and referred to a special committee of the House.
We applaud the task attempted by Mr. Warren, his Corporation and its workers. We applaud the honest effort, the realistic organization which has now been set up and the improved labour relations which have been initiated. We want to see that continued, Mr. Speaker, but it cannot under this Government's guidelines. It cannot carry on. We do not want to change Mr. Warren's direction. We just want it to be realistic.
This Government's policy towards the post office is off track and needs to be put back on the rails, headed in the proper direction. It is nice to be able to say it is a Crown Corporation now. It is independent of the Government. But that will not wash. It is not independent of the Government. The Government of Canada and the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs (Mr. Ouellet) are responsible for the Crown Corporation and for the taxpayers' money. They are responsible to make sure we have adequate postal service in this country at reasonable cost.
We are, therefore, calling on the Government to refuse the definition as proposed to it by the Canada Post Corporation and to refer the whole post office situation, after a year now of its operation, to a special committee of this House for review to see where we can go and what we can do to help it. We can then re-establish the parliamentary input by elected officials of this country to get the post office back on track. We could establish reasonable deficit reduction guidelines and Government response. We could maybe slide the deficit laterally for a year or two. We could maybe allow a longer period for it to be paid off. We could maybe authorize a permanent subsidy program, if necessary, we could also come up with a reasonable rate which is fair to business and to the Corporation. We could come up with a reasonable definition of "letter", after discussions with individuals, corporations, organizations, charitable groups and small businesses. This would be a defintion, Mr. Speaker, acceptable not only to business but to the Corporation.
We on this side of the House support the concept of the Canada Post Corporation, its management and its workers, but we want-no, we demand-an adequate level of service at reasonable cost to Canadians. This Government is preventing that from happening.
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[ Translation]
André Ouellet: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the proposal submitted by the postal critic of the Official Opposition. What struck me in the Hon. Member's speech is, that it is very easy for someone in the opposition to indulge in wishful thinking, without having to make difficult decisions. It is clear, Mr. Speaker, that the spokesman for the Progressive Conservative Party really has no solution to suggest, and that in fact, there are times when the Hon. Member is for the Canada Post Corporation and against the Government.
However, when the Corporation makes proposals under the Act that was passed here in Parliament and received the unanimous approval of this House, the Hon. Member no longer sides with the Corporation but with the businessmen and associations that have made representations to protest postal rate increases, just as he no longer sides with the Corporation but with those who objected to its definition of the term "letter". Clearly, the Hon. Member does not have the unanimous support of his own party, since what he is suggesting is that we increase the deficit and that Canadian taxpayers shoulder a greater share of the responsibility by taking on the deficit of the Canada Post Corporation. This is obviously not well received by his colleagues, the Members for York-Peel (Mr. Stevens), Mississauga South (Mr. Blenkarn) and Etobicoke Centre (Mr. Wilson), who are not in the House today, because if they were, they would object to what the Hon. Member has just told the House. And that is the beauty of being in the Opposition, the beauty of the Progressive Conservative Party, which is not in power and can afford to side with all parties at the same time, without having the responsibility for making important decisions.
Speaking of important decisions, I would like to announce that this morning, the Government of Canada made an important decision with regard to the definition of the term "letter". The House is aware, Mr. Speaker, that for several months the Government has been considering the draft definition of the term "letter" submitted by the Canada Post Corporation. To prepare this draft, the Corporation has been conducting consultations since last July with both individuals and a number of interested organizations. In the last few weeks, both the Corporation and the Government of Canada have received some excellent suggestions for amending the draft definition, especially in connection with bulk mail rates, handling of securities and the use of new technology in mail handling.
Since neither the Corporation nor the Governor in Council may amend the Act at this stage in order to incorporate the changes contemplated by the Corporation itself, and, of course, supported by the Government, it seems that now there is a preference for submitting a new draft definition that includes the desired amendments. That is what n,y colleague, the
Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism (Mr. Rompkey) told me in recent weeks on behalf of many associations and small businesses that wanted a more precise definition of the term "letter". I got the same message from the Minister of Finance (Mr. Lalonde) who has received representations from many associations which were mentioned earlier by the Hon. Member. The same stand was taken by the Consumers Association, which made some interesting representations on amendments that would be desirable. So, since the Corporation is agreeable to amendments, and since the government is in favour, this morning Cabinet decided not to approve the wording of the draft regulation.
However, I wish to point out that the Government continues to support the concept of exclusive privilege for the Corporation, as well as the need to establish a precise definition of the term "letter" that will enable the Corporation to exercise that privilege. This is very important for the Corporation, because it must be able to provide a universal postal service throughout the country for all Canadians. This exclusive right is, in fact, the basis of all postal services throughout the world. It is not uniquely Canadian. The same exclusive right is shared by all postal administrations throughout the world. It is also one of the basic characteristics of public transit and public utilities. Thus, the Government is asking the Corporation to submit, as soon as possible, within the next few weeks, a revised draft regulation that could become effective on the same date as the first proposal was to take effect, that is, on April 1, 1983.
We hope that consultations will continue with major national associations, which have made known their views and submitted some excellent suggestions. As for the Hon. Member's proposal to refer the matter to a parliamentary committee, I may remind the Hon. Member that no such mechanism is provided under the Act. Besides, when we were discussing the issue during consideration of Bill C-42 to establish the Canada Post Corporation, I appeared before two parliamentary committees to talk about this. At one committee meeting,
I heard the position taken by one of the Hon. Member's colleagues, the Member for Wellington-Dufferin-Simcoe (Mr. Beatty). At the other committee's meeting, I heard another of the Hon. Member's colleagues, the Member for Vancouver South (Mr. Fraser), who had a different view of the definition of the term "letter". In fact, after many discussions with both committees, it proved impossible to reconcile the views of all opposition Members, and especially those of the Progressive Conservative Members. And I do not think that if tomorrow we were to appear before a parliamentary committee, we would get a consensus on a definition of the term "letter" from the ranks of the Progressive Conservative Party.
I think that Parliament in its wisdom, by creating the Canada Post Corporation under Bill C-42, acknowledged that it was up to the Corporation to exercise its responsibilities, to take the initiative and to define what a letter should be. The
November 23, 1982

Government is supporting the Corporation in this matter, and it is open to recommendations and suggestions from the business world and the general public. It is in that spirit that we ask the Corporation once more to apply itself ingrudgingly to the job of finding a new definition that can be implemented in April 1983.
It would be appropriate in my view, at the beginning of this discussion, of the motion, to recall that Parliament attempted with Bill C-42 to create a social and economic base as much as a business entity when establishing the Canada Post Corporation. It must be remembered that the aim and duties assigned to the Corporation are complex, important and difficult. We should not underestimate the importance of this newly created corporation. Canada Post Corporation is the sixth largest employer in Canada, with some 60,000 employees, It operates 30 major establishments across the land and some 8,500 offices from sea to sea. Only one other Canadian company operates more trucks than Post Canada. The Corporation deals with no less that 20 unions and employee associations. Its turnover makes it the twentieth biggest business corporation in Canada. Therefore, Parliament established a highly important corporation when enacting Bill C-42 a few months ago.
It is much too soon in my view for the honourable member to take that corporation to task in this House. He is displaying a lack of tolerance and goodwill for the new corporation's directorship. Let us give them the time to prove themselves and then, if need be, we can criticize them. But for the time being, they are still entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should be helped over the next few months to reach the goals they set themselves.

I will say at the outset that 1 do not accept the premise of the Hon. Member for Haldimand-Norfolk (Mr. Bradley) that the Canada Post Corporation has blatantly reduced its services and raised its rates without full appreciation of the needs of Canadians. Indeed, the Government has not failed to enforce the Canada Post Corporation Act. The Government, Mr. Speaker, has observed the Corporation to be following a consistent, deliberate course of action to improve its service levels since proclamation day in October, 1981. It has also made considerable progress in reducing its expenditures base.
1 would like to return to the remark I made in October, 1980 in this House, when I was speaking on second reading of Bill C-42. I said at the time that all the postal unions had been fully consulted in the development of Bill C-42. It was with very complete agreement that we proceeded with the transformation of the Post Office Department to Crown corporation status. 1 acknowledged in 1980 that we had managed through a decade of conflict in the Post Office Department, and that we were now hopefully entering a decade of harmony.
Things have not always been simple in the past year, but the management-labour relationships in the Corporation have improved substantially. The Corporation has consulted with the unions on every major policy decision. That consultation has been constructive and to good effect. 1 would remind the
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Hon. Member who just spoke that the President of the Corporation, Mr. Warren, has pointed out on a number of occasions that successive quarters since October of 1981 have shown the lowest number of days lost to work disruptions of any time in the unionized history of the post office. That is progress; that must be recognized by the Members on both sides of this House.
Bill C-42 was developed with the extensive participation of Conservative Members as well. Allow me to quote a comment made in this House by the late Hon. Walter Dinsdale, a former Conservative critic of the post office. In passing, Mr. Speaker, I want to pay my respects to this great Parliamentarian, a friend of the postal workers, and to offer my deepest sympathy to his family. He said:
I have looked carefully through the information that is available in the Bill and it seems to me that it includes most of the recommendations this Party has made through the years, as well as the recommendations that were included in all the major studies done through the years.
Bill C-42 does provide a good framework of enabling legislation. It does not, however, nor was it ever intended to, spell out, prescribe, or detail exactly how the Corporation would carry out its day-to-day business. It provided the framework for the Canada Post Corporation Board of Directors and management to establish the service base required to maintain good, dependable postal service in Canada.
We asked the Corporation to maintain basic postal service, while improving and extending its products and services. Canada Post is also supposed to consider the role of its employees in reaching its goals to ensure commitment and dedication to the job at hand and to ensure labour stability. All this is to be done while rates are kept competitive and while a three-quarters of a billion dollar deficit is eliminated.
In its mandate, the Corporation's new management team is faced with competing objectives which will require time, cooperation, understanding and good management.
This "bashing exercise" which is in vogue today is not useful. I regret very much that the Conservatives have chosen to use this Opposition day to blame the Corporation for bad service and for increased postal rates. It is too easy to blame the post office and to refuse to see the progress that has been made. It is easy to espouse the popular habit of downgrading the post office. I would have hoped for a more responsible attitude on the part of the Official Opposition.
With the establishment of Canada Post as a Crown Corporation, the new management team was able to mould its legislative mandate into the first real business plan that the post office has ever had. The top three priorities which emerged from this business plan are easily stated. They are: to improve service; to promote and maintain better human relations within the Corporation; and to work toward financial self-sufficiency.
How has the Corporation performed on the first priority, to improve service? I would be the first to suggest that the Corporation must improve its service. There is no doubt about
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that and I am sure every Canadian wants to see an improvement in the service. It is important, however, to make sure that this is a priority of the Corporation-and it is. Canada Post has made a commitment to its customers that they are of paramount importance.
The Corporation has set up a national service improvement group that is responsible for managing some of its most immediate service projects. One of its initiatives deals specifically with large-volume mailers and accords second-class mail a higher priority than it has ever had before. The service improvement group is also directing a variety of other project teams working on areas like new and better transportation networks. Another team is working toward the implementation of a program called the national integrated forward sort and dispatch system, and that, the President of the Corporation has assured me, is an imposing name for a national routine to move the mail from origin to destination in a way that is more reliable, efficient and economical. The Corporation has turned the spotlight on critical points in its network of processing plants and has added a substantially strengthened team of quality control experts to ensure that new service quality plans are properly applied.

If Canada Post is to become again a reliable and efficient organization capable of meeting all of the requirements in the field of communications throughout our country, it must obviously implement an extensive improvement program. That is what 1 am saying, Mr. Speaker, improvements are already being implemented. In that respect, the President and Chief Executive Director said recently in Winnipeg, and 1 quote:
We have made organizational changes which have led to better mail service and lower expenditures through a more efficient use of our national network. We are in the process of developing and improving a system designed to better organize mail handling operations in all our major post offices with a view to beefing up co-ordination between staff, equipment and type of mail.
The Official Opposition is talking about reduced services. How can they say that service has deteriorated? Just what evidence do they have to make such a statement? They ought to know that Canada Post has a service quality control system on which it regularly reports to the public. I would remind the Hon. Member that our performance for first class mail delivered on time has reached 88 per cent last April as compared with approximately 80 per cent a year earlier. If we take a closer look, the results reveal that the April 1982 output with respect to first class local mail, that is letters posted in a city and bearing an address in the same city, is up to 94 per cent against 91.7 per cent the previous year. When it comes to first class mail sent to another city, commonly called forward mail, the performance rate has been 81 per cent for Canada as a whole, a significant improvement over the 66 per cent rate of the previous year.
I repeat, Mr. Speaker, since it was created on October 16, 1981, the Canada Post Corporation has made every effort to provide a better service to its clients. Changes in mail handling procedures, new transportation routes and improved controls
over the national networks are just a few of the service initiatives that have been and are being applied. Consider the results of these initiatives. For August, 1982, on time delivery of first class mail was 88.7 per cent. This represents the highest monthly average that Canada Post has attained since 1976. The figures quoted fully demonstrate that Canada Post is working very hard to improve its services and that it has succeeded so far, no matter what the Member of the Official Opposition who spoke before me may think.

Let me turn now to a concrete example of improved service, Mr. Speaker. By the way, this improved service was made possible through the improving labour-management relationship that I spoke of earlier. Hon. Members will recall that the last major expansion of mail delivery service undertaken by the old Post Office Department occurred during the fiscal year 1978-79.


Mr. Orlikow:: Just before the election.


André Ouellet: On February 25, 1982 the Corporation announced that some 74,751 new homes and businesses would be served by some 170 additional letter carriers, beginning in April, 1982. These service improvements were made possible in large part by the increased postal rates which came into effect last January and by the introduction of productivity bargaining features in the 1982 contract reached with the Letter Carriers' Union of Canada. New letter carrier routes have been serviced in a number of cities across Canada.
It is worth taking a moment to recount the additional person-years which have been made available during a time of restraint. The union and management agreed to a number of productivity improvement measures, such as route restructuring and computerization of label redirection cards. The cost savings achieved from these and other productivity gains have provided some of the resources to meet service needs in other communities.
I take this major investment in improved delivery service as an early and concrete indication of the Corporation's commitment to its mandate and to its primary business objective, which is better postal service for all Canadians.
The Hon. Member briefly talked about Saturday rural delivery. He alluded to the question of the reduction of counter hours and espoused the idea that post offices will be closed. I do not know what he had in mind when he said this. Perhaps he was trying to scare people. One thing for sure is that the new Crown Corporation has a mandate to continue to give Canadians the type of services to which they have become accustomed. Not only will it continue this service but it will improve on it. This is what the Corporation is doing.
We will not involve ourselves in the day-to-day activities of the Corporation. I suppose the Hon. Member who saw his
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Party voting in favour of the creation of the Crown Corporation would like to forget that this Corporation was given a mandate to administer in its best interests. We have ways to review and look at decisions taken by the Corporation. 1 have no hesitation in saying that in relation to Saturday services in small post offices, where there has been a tradition of providing counter services, nothing will be done in this regard without proper consultations taking place in the communities involved.
Also I assure the Elouse that the Corporation does not intend to proceed with the plan described by the speaker who preceded me. Indeed, the Corporation is looking at many ways to improve services and to continue to give the level of service to which Canadians across the country have become accustomed.
I would like to turn now to another aspect of the motion which is before the House. It concerns the financial responsibility of the Corporation. The post office has been accustomed to deficits for many years. In 1982 we allowed a substantial postal rate increase. In fact, if that rate had not been approved, its deficit would have approached the $1 billion mark.
I understand that my time has almost expired. I should like to conclude my remarks with the indulgence of the House because the point I want to make is an important one. Is it agreed?


Some Hon. Members:: Agreed.


André Ouellet: The President of the Corporation indicated that instead of the deficit being around $1 billion without the 1982 rate increase, its deficit was now around $660 million. For the fiscal year 1982-83, the Corporation is committed to bringing that amount down to the $400 million range. This was made public in the statement of the former Minister of Finance when he discussed the plans of the Post Office Corporation. This is a substantial reduction with which the Corporation is prepared to live. The reduction of pressure upon taxpayers is in the range of 35 per cent to 40 per cent.
I am sure that some of the colleagues of the Hon. Member would be pleased to know that it is a relief on taxpayers, such as the Hon. Member for York-Peel (Mr. Stevens) who always talks about deficits, the Hon. Member for Etobicoke Centre (Mr. Wilson) and the Hon. Member for Mississauga South (Mr. Blenkarn). Surely they will welcome this initiative. We have to admit that it is a large reduction by anyone's standards. In fact, it is good news for Canadians who want to see their post office firmly on the road to lasting improvements.
I find it difficult to swallow the figures of the Hon. Member who spoke before me. He talked about 82 per cent increases in postal rates. It is misleading to relate the February 15, 1983 postal increase to the January 1, 1982 rate revision, as he did, without also bearing in mind the inordinately long period of time from 1979 to 1982 during which postal rates were not modified.
In reality, by February 15, 1983, when the proposed 32 cent rate will take effect, it will have been more than 13 months since the last postal rate revision, and it will have taken nearly four years for the price of a first-class letter to move from 17
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cents to 32 cents. In this context, and considering the rise in the cost of such items as gasoline by more than 100 per cent and transportation by more than 60 per cent since 1979, the over-all increase in the cost of postage has not been excessive.
The framework for postal activities provided by Bill C-42 is a good one, but by the very nature of the business it operates, Canada Post is faced with a massive challenge. As I said earlier, it must improve its service performance and its human relations; it must attain financial self-sufficiency. I have no doubt that in due course they will be attained.
The Hon. Member suggested that perhaps the period in which to attain these goals should be a little longer. We will see as we go through the years. We know that the chairman and chief executive officer of the Corporation is ready to live with the objective of $400 million, the objective at which we are looking. I think there is no problem for the Government or for the Corporation to live within this objective. In the future we will see; we will cross the bridge when we arrive at the river. We are not yet there.
If the Opposition wants to be constructive, it can best do so with some tolerance vis-a-vis the Corporation, with the visible support of Hon. Members on all sides of the House, and with approval of and support for the worthwhile and needed initiatives taken by the new Corporation.
Every Member of the House recognizes the importance of providing efficient, affordable and equitable mail service to Canadians. But we must also recognize that a particular initiative can be criticized or condemned if one forgets the complexity of the challenge facing the Canada Post Corporation.
The Government has taken the most important First step in creating a renewed and vigorous Canadian postal system. It has created a postal Corporation and accorded it the legislative framework and mandate for it to do its job. We have appointed a representative, responsible and interested Board of Directors. We have watched as a very sound management team has taken over one of the country's largest businesses.
I am certain the Corporation will be able to stand on its own record of performance in the years to come. We must give it the chance to do so and Parliamentarians would be better to let it do its job. These people have been appointed to do the job. Give them the chance to do it and leave the politicking out of it.
I am sure that we all will be pleased to see the results when, in a few years time, this Corporation will again be a very proud organization serving the people of Canada well and being very appreciated by all the people of Canada.

Mr. Speaker, the efforts made so far by the Canada Post Corporation have brought results. The proposed objectives, I must admit, have not been reached, but I feel optimistic

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because of the measures which have been implemented by the officials. The Canada Post Corporation is well on its way to achieving the goals for which it was established. Therefore 1 feel that not only should we give it our support but also the time necessary to fulfill its mission.


Lyle Stuart Kristiansen: Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on today's motion which reads:
That this House, recognizing the importance of providing efficient, affordable, equitable mail service to all Canadians, and recognizing that Canada Post has reduced service while increasing its rates, condemns the Government for its failure to enforce the provisions of the Canada Post Corporation Act which require Canada Post to provide Canadians with adequate service at a reasonable cost.
This is a motion which I, and I believe the people of Canada, welcome.
1 would first like to say to the Minister, in particular, that my colleagues and I in this Party will be responsible. In being responsible, we will not attack the Canada Post Corporation nor the new management of that Corporation. Unlike the irresponsibility shown by Liberals and Conservatives in the House and across the country, irresponsibility which they have shown in numerable occasions, we will not attack the employees of the Corporation, whether they be inside workers or outside workers. We in the NDP want the Government, the Official Opposition and especially the Minister also to be responsible. In this respect I could not help but think that he sounded like the Minister of Employment and Immigration (Mr. Axworthy) who, during a recent debate in the House, appeared so sensitive to attacks on his poor administration that he tried to pretend that Opposition Members, whether Tories or from the NDP, were attacking the employees of the Unemployment Insurance Commission instead of the policies of the Minister. Similarly, this Minister's policy towards the post office has left it with little alternative but to do the damage that is being done.
The result of the entire administration of Canada Post today has been some improvement to urban services, while there is a reduction in service, poorer service and I would suggest almost a sabotage of service in rural Canada. The effect the Government has had on the Canada Post Corporation as a result of the Minister's policies is typical of what happens when you give any city slicker lawyer the responsibility for essential services to rural Canada.
This is similar to the problem which was faced by VIA Rail after its services were separated. It was given an impossible mandate, starved of funds and resources and the passenger service was separated from the freight service which financially carried it. This same situation is happening to the post office, whereby the Government will likely eventually decide that the service to rural Canada has become uneconomic. It will build up a large public blacklash, especially from some of the private sector, which will then demand to be allowed to cream off those portions of the postal service which are
profitable and then leave the remaining Canadians, particularly those in the hinterland areas of Canada, with no service or with service at excessive cost which they cannot honestly be expected to bear.
I admit from the outset that there have been improvements in the Canada Post Corporation. One of these improvements has been an increase in mail delivered "on time" from approximately 80 per cent to 89 per cent during the last year. That is a significant improvement over a relatively short period. That is one of very few improvements. We have also seen many other basic services threatened.
I want to express my consternation and surprise at the Conservative Party for proposing a motion such as this. It takes a lot of nerve and even more hypocrisy for them to do this. The Conservatives have given their support to, and in fact called for many of the policies that the Government has agreed to follow-since the Government is acting like Tories so often-and that are causing the problems that exist within the Canadian postal service. 1 am amazed at the gall shown by those who proposed this motion when I consider what they have done previously.
Only a year ago we in the NDP, along with most Members from all Parties and certainly the vast majority of Canadians, were at least hopeful, if not optimistic, that the birth of the Canada Post Corporation, which had been demanded by so many for so long, could be a genuine rebirth of a once proud and efficient servant of the Canadian people. I say "hopefull" and not "optimistic" because we had some grave doubts due to what we believed to be the straitjacket of the unrealistic timetable of total and early self-imposed restraint and financial self-sufficiency which was demanded by the Government and supported by the Conservatives. The Government and those Members of the Official Opposition who sponsored the Government's policy were not satisfied with shackling this infant Corporation with the impossible demand of short-term self-sufficiency. They proceeded to starve it and batter it with the six and five program while hypocritically demanding that this infant Corporation rush to premature maturity and provide proper service to Canadians.
Let us examine what exactly was done. Michael Warren, President of Canada Post Corporation, has continually spelled out the three primary goals of the Corporation, as provided for under the Canada Post Corporation Act. The first goal is improved service; the second is improved human relations; the third is financial self-sufficiency. In the budget of November 12, 1981, a couple of budgets and one economic statement ago, the then Minister of Finance very clearly laid out the Government's expectations for financial self-sufficiency. From 198182, the Government expects the Canada Post Corporation to reduce its deficit of $620 million to zero by the year 1985-86. That is quite a demand at a time when the Government, the Official Opposition and this party are also apparently and hopefully committed to at least providing efficient and improved service across the country.
*

November 23, 1982

The Minister, in speaking during consideration of the Canada Post Corporation Act on October 24, 1980, laid out his own objectives. He said:
Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to explain the legislation in great detail here this afternoon. However, I wish to mention a few points. First, I should like to speak about the mandate of the new corporation as described in clause 5 of the act, and I quote:
5. (1) The objects of the corporation are to establish and operate a postal
service ... within Canada-
That is nice. I agree with that. He went on:
(2) While maintaining basic customary postal service, the corporation, in
carrying out its objects, shall have a regard to:
-four other factors. And this sentence, Mr. Speaker, is essential to make hon. members of the House and particularly the Canadian public understand that the creation of a Crown corporation does not mean a reduction of services usually assured to the public. We wanted to write down this guarantee in the act so that Canadians, particularly in remote areas of the country and rural sectors which are often affected by decisions made by large Canadian corporations, would not be penalized by the creation of a Canada Post corporation which would operate in the Canadian capital and that would become insensitive to the aspirations of those Canadians, particularly in the rural and remote areas of the country. So I say that clause 5 guarantees that the same level of essential services will be maintained and this is one of the objectives of the legislation for which the new corporation will be responsible.
That is not what has happened. A few moments ago the Minister outlined the fact that in some areas of urban and western Canada, and particularly in the City of Calgary, people have finally been given the household delivery routes to which they have long been entitled and for which they have waited a long time. That is good. As 1 also said earlier, and as did the Minister, there has been an improvement in the time it takes to receive delivery of first-class mail.
However, in the meantime what are some of the drastic reductions in services that we have seen? There have been the closings of small rural post offices when single operators are unable to work and threatened Saturday closures of many rural post offices; the discontinuance of Saturday delivery to areas in rural Canada; and the current attempt by Canada Post to cancel carrier delivery on residential routes whenever a letter carrier is ill, which matter is now before arbitration. Even if a carrier who reports sick is a carrier on a business route, a carrier will be taken off a residential route to fill his place, which means that people in residential homes across Canada will not get the service to which they are entitled. In order to do this, the management of Canada Post is being forced, by the financial straitjacket imposed by the Government and the Official Opposition, arising from the six and five provision and the Canada Post Corporation Act, to abrogate many sections of its collective agreement. Again, there are several key arbitration cases presently pending on that matter. That is a sure-fire way of recreating exactly the kind of nightmare in industrial relations within the postal service which is one of the things that 1 believed all of us in the House were trying to get over. And you guys are wrecking it.


Erik Nielsen: Honourable guys.


Lyle Stuart Kristiansen: Those honourable guys are wrecking it. I sometimes wonder.
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The suggestion has been made in a number of quarters that these moves not to replace carriers who are sick and to deny people the residential route services and delivery to which they are entitled is simply testing the waters for what is called "alternate day delivery". That would mean that one would get one's mail only every second day, except on the weekends, when one would not get it at all. At one time we had six-day delivery in this country, but will it now be reduced to delivery every two and a half or three days?
What is the design? City slicker lawyers are in charge of rural services again. There is also a current attempt to eliminate 1,500 jobs as a budgetary cutback and that will not do much for service, either. If it is found that those employees are redundant, not necessary in order to carry on the legitimate functions of the post office, that is something that everyone can realize, and one can sit down and negotiate that problem with people. However, there should not be a speeded up, forced cutback in the way that the Government's policies and those of the Official Opposition are forcing the management of the Post Corporation to do. At the same time, we are seeing a constant, stubborn refusal to initiate carrier service in many other new communities which are being forced to resort to group boxes instead. Of course, while all of this has been going on, the cost of this reduction in service has been going up and up, both for group boxes and post boxes in the various post offices across the country-that is, when people can get into them, because some of the rural post offices are being closed on Saturday, too.
There has been an increase of 82 per cent or 92 per cent in the cost of a postage stamp to mail a letter over a period of just the last year. First, the cost was raised from 17 cents to 30 cents and now, by another 2 cents, to 32 cents. That is the present end of what has been an increasingly sad story for the past many years. Some 20 years ago I worked in this city in another capacity and had to do a fair amount of mailing from an office here in Ottawa to reach people out on the West Coast, amongst other locations. At that time I could pretty well count on the fact that if I dropped a letter in the mailbox prior to two or three o'clock in the afternoon, someone in downtown Vancouver, even someone receiving residential mail, not just business mail, would get it the next day. There was about an 80 per cent chance. Certainly, if that person did not receive it the next day, he would receive it the day after that. However, now we hear the Minister bragging because the amount of delivery time has been reduced and that, on average, mail will cover that same span of territory, with all the increases in technology and science, in four or five days. That is called a great improvement.
In the last 20 years what has happened? Even more recently, in 1968, when the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) took office, we had 6-cent delivery. It was raised to 7 cents, then to 8 cents, 10 cents, 12 cents, 14 cents, 17 cents, 30 cents and now 32 cents. There has been a 540 per cent increase since the Prime Minister took office. Instead of getting delivery across the country in one day or, at the most, two days, the Government

November 23, 1982
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brags about the fact that we will get it in four or five days. Certainly the imposed financial restrictions, the demand for unrealistic and early financial self-sufficiency which was demanded and implemented, and is still being implemented by the Government, creates an unrealistic pair of handcuffs for a post office management which is desperately trying to come to grips with the problems it has inherited in its attempt to provide better and improved service.
Next we had Bill C-124 and the six and five solution, another heavy-handed attempt to find scapegoats for the problems that that bunch over there created, and again the Government was supported by the Official Opposition, the Conservative Party, which has the gall to put this motion before us today. In the Standing Committee on Miscellaneous Estimates which was studying submissions on Bill C-124, the six and five Bill, one of the Directors of Canada Post Corporation, Mr. Ron Lang, gave testimony. 1 asked him specifically what the likely impact of Bill C-124 would be on the post office, and 1 want to quote from Mr. Lang's response:
Let me be quite frank with you. Since this Bill has come down, it has not only thrown into question all the objectives of Canada Post Corporation, because the five-year plan which had been drawn up and the financial targets which are to be met are now all thrown into jeopardy, both on the receipt side and on the expenditure side-it is very, very doubtful whether the Crown corporation, if the Government pursues its Bill C-124, particularly on the price increase side but also on the labour relations side, is going to be able to meet its financial commitments or the financial stringencies this Government has placed on it. In other words, if it cannot meet them, what it is going to mean, in my opinion, as a director, is that the Crown corporation is going to have a larger deficit, and that is going to have to come out of general revenue.
So the Government puts it in handcuffs and then starts to kick it around. Then it complains about us, over here, being irresponsible because we say that it is not providing the service, that those city slicker lawyers over there do not care about what is happening to postal service in rural Canada. You call us irresponsible? That is really a laugh!
Again, these Members to my right are every bit as culpable because they set in place many of the backlashes and demands for early restraint, particularly the Member for York-Peel (Mr. Stevens) in his crusade that has made this Government act like Conservatives and do what they are doing.
I would just say that the Government must have an evil design, which they are masquerading or they are fools. It is their choice and they now have a chance to show their real hand once and for all. I and my Party urge them now to change course, to be flexible, to remove the impossible early target of total financial self-sufficiency and to urge Canada Post to extend the principle of industrial democracy in the management of that Postal Service in order that it be given room to act and deliver the goods on time, and at reasonable cost to the people of Canada whom we serve.



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

Mr. Deputy Speaker:: It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 40, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: The Hon. Member for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake (Mr. Anguish)- Public Accounts-Auditor General's certificate, (b) Government response; the Hon. Member for Esquimalt-Saanich (Mr. Munro)-Canadian Transport Commission-Severity of penalty imposed on Air B.C. (b) Commission's powers; the Hon. Member for Mississauga South (Mr. Blenkarn)-The Economy-Government policy affecting private sector, (b) Interest rate levels.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Bradley:
That this House, recognizing the importance of providing efficient, affordable, equitable mail service to all Canadians, and recognizing that Canada Post has reduced service while increasing its rates, condemns the Government for its failure to enforce the provisions of the Canada Post Corporation Act which require Canada Post to provide Canadians with adequate service at a reasonable cost.
Mir. Albert Cooper (Peace River): Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to enter into this debate on the motion that has been filed by my colleague the hon. member for Haldimand-Norfold (Mr. Bradley), a motion that a number of us have wanted to have a chance to discuss. We have certainly wanted to have a chance to look at the postal facilities in Canada.
Today I want to look at basically three areas that are of concern to people in my riding. The first would be the monopoly aspects of the postal Corporation; the second would be the reduction of services that we are experiencing; and the third would be the lack of adequate facilities in many parts of my riding.
Dealing first with the monopoly aspects of the Corporation, we know that in the past there was a historical justification for this monopoly, simply because no one wanted to deliver the mail. Today there is no longer that justification. Private firms can provide the service, and there have been changes in technology that open all sorts of horizons for the delivery of mail.
In the past that monopoly was not strictly enforced, because it could not be. There was really no legal definition of a letter

[Stage Direction]
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November 23, 1982
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that allowed them to enforce that monopoly. That situation existed from the beginning of the postal service in Canada up until today.
Suddenly we are finding that private firms and other Governments can be competitive with the postal service in both price and service. The result of that is that the post office is now feeling a little threatened, so rather than look to improvements in service and competitiveness it has moved to expand its monopoly. How did it do that? It was in the area of redefining a letter. 1 understand that as of this morning it has decided to pull back that definition and reconsider. I am glad to see that, but certainly it is a little coincidental that it happens to be on the same day that we are going to debate that very issue. That definition was designed to close out competition and to guarantee the postal Corporation's market share, regardless of its competency or its efficiency.
If we look at the definition that had been proposed, I think we will see why. It is this:
Mailable matter in any form, the mass of which does not exceed 500 grams, whether or not enclosed in an envelope, that is intended for transmission to any destination.
That definition was obviously very broad and very sweeping. We know that there were to be some exceptions to it, but they were few. What we found with that definition was that anything that could be sent was classified as mail. One of the aspects that caused me so much concern about that and about the monopolistic attitudes of the Corporation is that those powers can be defended and implemented simply by regulation, that is by Order in Council and so on. They do not have to come before the House of Commons.
This Crown Corporation can and is, and certainly was, in the terms of that past definition, willing to show its willingness to manipulate the marketplace to its own advantage, instead of really honing itself or working to improve its competition or to improve its efficiency, and essentially to create a better opportunity for itself in the marketplace. Instead of becoming the preferred route to the preferred option, it was gambling on closing the doors and forcing out its competition. What we saw in fact was that electronic mail would come under the jurisdiction of the post office. We found that courier service charges could go up and would be at a rate three times that of first-class mail. Couriers would have to charge triple that rate. We found that hand-delivered bills, whether by a municipality or by a corporation, would become illegal. They would now have to be delivered through the post office. All of this was brought about simply by publication in The Canada Gazette, and that was considered significant notice of change. That is how that definition was brought in.
Just to get an example of how that works, I think we should take a closer look at the definition process and how it came about. The information that that definition must be changed was placed in The Canada Gazette which, I am informed, has a circulation of approximately 2,700 people in Canada out of a total of 20 million who would use the postal facilities.
The only other thing that I understand was done was that a kit was sent to the media describing these changes. There was
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no kit sent to industry or to major users of the postal service. In fact, what happened is that opposition to that definition came about almost by accident. It was almost by word of mouth. It almost slipped by because there was not any great amount of publicity about it.
It would seem from that and from the previous definition that what we were going to see was that Canadians would be expected to pay inflationary prices simply to guarantee the profitability of Canada Post. We know that those cost increases are going to contribute to inflation, whether by adding costs to municipalities, to utility companies or to other corporations, because they cannot hand deliver their mail. All those things are reflected back into the spiral.
Something else that would have been affected by that definition would be the fact that we would have been looking at increased courier costs simply because there would no longer be the option of using bulk mail. They would charge for every individual envelope rather than using the bulk mail rate. Also there was to be charges on electric mail.
The defence for that definition was that Canada Post would never use the extreme power it had or the full, broad range of the definition. My question is, why in the world would they want to put it in? My question now is what kind of definition are we going to be looking at? Will it be significantly improved or will there be a bit of juggling and have much the same comeback?
These broad powers seem to be more and more a bad habit of this Government. We saw that reflected in Bill C-48 and in the National Energy Program. We see it also in Bill C-10. All the time we see the Government reaching out for power over large areas of territories and saying they will never use it. My theory is, if you don't need it, don't put it in; and if you do put it in, you are dealing with bad legislation.
The last concern I have with the monopoly approach to postal service is what it does toward eliminating competition. What happens here is very simple. If we end up in a strike situation in this country, as we have in the past, Canadians will be left in a very vulnerable position. Had the definition we had previously tabled gone through, much of that competition would have disappeared. Municipalities would not have been able to deliver their own mail. Therefore, we are left in a very vulnerable position.
I want to emphasize that I essentially grew up in the postal service in a lot of ways. My father worked in the post office virtually all his life. I know that the vast majority in the postal service are competent, efficient and hard-working. My question is, why does not Canada Post try to capitalize on those natural assets rather than try to protect its inefficiencies by going for a monopoly, increasing its territory and cutting out its competition? It should be capitalizing on what it has going for it. 1 believe it has a great deal going for it.
I want to move to the second area of concern, reduction of service. I relate that to rural Canada because in rural Canada the post office has historically had and today has a very special
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significance. It has become a vehicle for virtually everything, including shopping, regular mail, magazines and so on. It has become a very large part of rural life. However, there has been a steady deterioration of service in rural Canada. Now that service will be reduced even more.
This time it is going to be reduced with a double-edged sword. The first edge of that sword is no Saturday delivery. The second is that no postal stations will be open on Saturday. That may not be particularly significant in downtown Toronto, but it is in rural Peace River, rural Grande Prairie, Valleyview, Debolt and so on. Saturday is a very significant day for our farmers. It has long been the traditional marketing day, the day when farmers come to town to purchase their parts, get their groceries and, of course, pick up their mail. Suddenly we find that generations of tradition will come to an end, all this after rural customers have been suffering delivery problems in the past. Many have been driving five, ten, 15 or 20 miles or more to pick up their mail. Now there will be no Saturday delivery and the offices will not be open on Saturday.
The third area 1 want to touch on is facilities. That certainly is a very big concern in my part of the country. Not only do we have areas without delivery, which complicates things because it creates long waiting times in post offices simply because there are no boxes, but people are forced to pick up their mail in general delivery. That again complicates the process and again there are long lines. On top of that we find that many postal stations are in a poor state of repair with little room, poor light and heat, a shortage of staff, no parking space and so on. All of this is being provided by a Crown Corporation that wants to guarantee "that all Canadians have access to a basic level of service''.
1 want to give a few illustrations of that. In the City of Grande Prairie the post office is 20 years out of date. There is a shortage of boxes, both in the physical building and in the neighbourhood surrounding the town. There have been long delays for mail because of the huge line-ups for the general delivery service and lack of facilities. That City was promised a new post office building, with construction to begin in 198283. I met with senior officials of the Crown Corporation to discuss that. I now find that it has been delayed. How long, 1 do not know. I do not yet have any answers. It could be next year or the year after. There are no specifics. That area desperately needs new postal facilities.
McLellan has a post office facility which was built as a house in 1940. It is expected there will be considerable growth in that town next year with two major industries moving in. The postal facilities are already out of date for the existing population. In the Town of Grimshaw the post office is approximately one-half the size that is required. Again improved facilities have been promised, going back three years, but still no results.
In the small community of Debolt the postal facilities are so bad that they cannot even lock the door. It does not fit. It is propped shut by cans, garbage and so on. We have a lot of promises but very little tangible action in terms of providing
facilities in rural Peace River where these facilities are so desperately needed.
Coupled with this we are now going to have a reduction in delivery service. That will cause even further delays, longer line-ups, more unsorted mail and more angry customers. Still the postal service remains intent on protecting its monopoly, protecting itself and cutting off competition. However, the problems will continue because the basic problems we are faced with are not being solved.
In his speech today the Minister gave a couple of definitions of the Crown Corporation. One was with regard to price increases. He said we have to be fair, that the price of a stamp has only gone from 17 cents to 32 cents over four years. That is still more than a 25 per cent a year increase. That is the justification of a Government which so loudly and provocatively talks about the six and five regime; it says 25 per cent is not bad.
The Minister spent a great deal of time saying that the post office is making improvements and a lot of progress. I say to him that the bottom line in improvements never comes from the manager or management, it has to come from the customer. Recently a survey was done among small businesses with regard to postal service in Canada. I understand it involved about 9,000 people. Approximately 67 per cent said there was no change in service; around 24 per cent said it was worse. Only 2 per cent said it was improved. Therefore, there is still a lot of work to do, certainly in terms of service and facilities.
We should continue to press for those improvements. I know they very much affect the riding of Peace River. It is something that I still get more mail on than almost any other issue.
Mr. Carlo Rossi (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State (Multiculturalism)):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to have this opportunity of expressing my views on this motion. When we hear Hon. Members of the Opposition criticize alleged reductions in postal service, it soon becomes clear that the real target of their criticism is the Government. However, in this case, they missed their target. In fact, the legislation passed by the House on April 14, 1981 was approved by all parties, and no one can deny that. Thanks to this legislation under which the Canada Post Corporation was created, Canadians have enjoyed vastly improved, more consistent and faster postal services, a better job environment and all without increasing the deficit and the burden on the Canadian taxpayer.
It would be useful to recall the objects of this Crown corporation. The reason for entrusting a corporation rather than a department with responsibility for establishing and operating a postal service is that this was an opportunity for renewing the Canadian postal system and making it a source of pride for all Canadians.
November 23, 1982

So what has Parliament asked the new corporation to do? While maintaining basic postal service, the Corporation shall improve and extend its products and services, it shall provide a standard of service that will meet the needs of Canadians and that is similar, and I emphasize this, with respect to communities of the same size, and it shall utilize the human resources of the Corporation in a manner that will both attain the objects of the Corporation and ensure the commitment and dedication of its employees to the attainment of those objects. But that is not all. There is also the requirement to do all of this while maintaining rates that are both competitive and sufficient to help reduce a very substantial deficit.
At first glance, these objects seem to be so many constraints and by the same token, impossible to achieve, but nevertheless, if we take a careful look at the Corporation's first year of existence, it is clear that Canadian postal services have already made tremendous progress. The Corporation's management is to be praised for having translated the objects defined by Parliament into a management plan. I may add that the unions were also involved in this process as well as many of those who in the past have tried to introduce changes in our postal administration. Concentrating on three main elements: service, human relations and financial self-sufficiency, this management plan, which some people are anxious to criticize-i am sure 1 do not know why-has throughout 1982 given us a level of postal service we have not experienced for some time. I realize that much remains to be done, but the fact is that the Corporation is off to a head start and has a very good chance of being a winner.
The Canada Post Corporation has made service its number one priority. Service has not been interrupted. In fact, we have consistently had better and better quality service. There seems to be an atmosphere of openness in contacts between the Corporation and the unions representing its employees. Here again, Mr. Speaker, the Corporation has become more reliable as an enterprise, and less susceptible to work stoppages whenever there is a difference of opinion between parties in the collective bargaining process. The Corporation has managed to cut spending substantially without resorting to massive lay-offs that would have raised an already high unemployment rate during our present economic recession. The Corporation's objectives have all been met, and it is surprising to hear people talking about reductions in service, while the opposite is true. Keeping a steady course while at the same time keeping all three objectives in line is no mean feat, and it should be recognized that both directors and employees of the Corporation are doing an excellent job.
The question is, where was the Corporation to get the money it needed to improve services, while it had to reduce its deficit of $200 million or $300 million? How could it maintain industrial peace when it had to change many of its procedures, which would inevitably result in major changes as far as the employees were concerned? The objects that formed the basis for this new Crown Corporation were and still are essential to
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the renewal of our postal service. A start has been made, and it is a fact that the infant is in pretty good health, Mr. Speaker.
If Canada's postal service is to maintain the course set out for it by the Members of this House, the Corporation's directors must have the authority to make adjustments to the manner in which, services are provided. The Corporation must be given the tools it requires to carry out its mission. The Corporation's board of directors has specific powers with a view to managing Canadian postal services. Although, as in other areas, Parliament must maintain a healthy vigilance, it would be unfortunate and contrary to the spirit in which the legislation was passed to make this debate some sort of trial based on incomplete and biased evidence.
Mr. Speaker, I am convinced that thanks to the provisions of our legislation, the objectives of the Corporation and the professionalism of its directors and its employees, Canadians will be provided with a better postal service. We have already witnessed a promising initial step. This is a start, it should be encouraged, and Members on both sides of the House should be prepared to do so.


Stan Darling: Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to be able to take part in the debate on this motion by my colleague, the Hon. Member for Haldimand-Norfolk (Mr. Bradley), which states:
That this House, recognizing the importance of providing efficient, affordable, equitable mail service to all Canadians, and recognizing that Canada Post has reduced service while increasing its rates, condemns the Government for its failure to enforce the provisions of the Canada Post Corporation Act which require Canada Post to provide Canadians with adequate service at a reasonable cost.
I have had the privilege of serving as a Member of our Party's post office committee for a number of years, Mr. Speaker. I also had the distinct privilege of serving under the former post office critic, the Hon. Walter Dinsdale, who, as we are all aware, is being buried this afternoon in his home town of Brandon. Walter had a special and wonderful way of communicating with those with whom we had considerable differences.
As we are aware, the post office had, 1 believe, 28 unions and it was hoped that with this new Canada Post Corporation that number would be reduced, thereby reducing the possibility of strikes. I recall when we were meeting with the unions, in particular with CUPW, we had to deal with that flamboyant Scotsman, Joe Davidson, and Walter was able to reason with him, and then later on with Jean-Claude Parrot. 1 see the former Postmaster General smiling. Mr. Parrot was not as easy to deal with, nor as flamboyant, as the great Joe Davidson but he was a pretty tough nut, too. I also recall the many meetings we had with the Letter Carriers' Union and Bob McGarry and Bill Finley. Certainly that union has been a very reasonable one. Let us hope that both unions are now well aware of the serious situation with which the Canada Post

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Corporation is faced, although I think all Members would agree that CUPW is still not the most popular union on the ratings scale across Canada.
Now, we on this side of the House had long urged the conversion of the then post office to a Crown Corporation. We were moving in that direction in 1979. I can only say, therefore, what a crushing disappointment it has been to us all to see the direction which the new Corporation, launched with such hope so short a while ago, has now taken. Years ago the Royal Mail moved swiftly, surely, efficiently and cheaply. It operated as a virtual monopoly because it did its job so well that it was unchallenged. People trusted the post office. They had such confidence in it that they paid it the ultimate compliment; they took it for granted. They did not even consider the possibility that articles in its care might be lost, delayed or damaged, things that we assume will happen today and do happen today.
I do not want to suggest that we felt its conversion to Crown corporation status would magically bring back the good old days; far from it. But we felt by providing a corporate framework, semi-autonomous from the cold hand of the cabinet, with a thrust into the icy waters of the competitive world of private enterprise, that we were giving it the best chance to work out its own salvation. So far it has not worked, for a number of reasons.
In my estimation, Mr. Speaker, the root cause of the Corporation's difficulties is the mandate with which this Government cast it adrift in the first place. Specifically, what other Crown corporation has ever been created and then told, concurrent with efforts to get its feet firmly planted in a new environment, to eradicate a massive operating deficit? It had been saddled with that deficit, 1 might add, by policies of the very Government that was wishing it bon voyage. So as the direct result of an insane repayment schedule the Government sends it off with a little christening gift of a 76 per cent increase in postal rates.
Everyone in the country, it seemed, was highly upset but the duplicity had worked; they were not upset at the Government, who had not only authorized the new rates but by its policies had made them necessary. No, they were upset at the new postal corporation. What a parting gift from its loving parent!
As a result of the framework within which it was forced to act from the very beginning, the Corporation was forced to take some very hard and unpleasant decisions. The most unsavoury of these is its quest for a monopoly in its area of operations. The very idea is repugnant in a society which likes to think of itself as still retaining some semblance of free enterprise orientation. This organization has been declared to be a genuine corporation, just like in the private sector. It has been sent out into the world with an utterly unconscionable price increase, the likes of which no private sector entity would ever be able to impose. Then, to prevent the public from registering its disapproval in the time-honoured free enterprise way, its competition is forced to charge three times whatever Canada Post charges, whether or not it is necessary from a business standpoint. Whatever Canada Post chooses to charge,
the competition is forced to price itself out of the market. It is breath-taking. It is what Karl Marx warned us about, only he thought it would be the private sector that tried taking the ordinary people to the cleaners.


André Ouellet: You were at the committee and voted for it.


Stan Darling: Most certainly I was at the committee, and we felt anything would be an improvement. Certainly I voted for it along with other members of the committee, but we felt the Corporation would be an improvement and we were guaranteed by the Postmaster General that it would solve a great many of the problems. I would like the Hon. Minister to refute that.
When the rest of the business community, Mr. Speaker, must compete for the patronage of the public by offering better service and greater value for money paid, I find it offensive that a Crown corporation can effectively legislate its competition out of business. The Minister, when queried in committee about couriers, sort of sidestepped the issue a bit and then finally said that, well, couriers would be tolerated. Of course, we now know they are being tolerated but this is certainly going to change, I understand. It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, that in today's Toronto Sun there is a heading which says: "McGill Prof Says Feds Show: Anti-combines Flaw". It goes on to mention the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs and amendments to the Combines Investigation Act, and then finishes off with this:
The Government is one of the biggest offenders in competition, he adds. "Canada Post (run by Michael Warren) is a case in point. In mail delivery, would-be competitors are warned off by the prospect of fines and jail sentences."
We are well aware that a good many municipalities are feeling the pinch because of the great demands on their services and, of course, municipal taxes have been increasing drastically. Some municipalities are endeavouring to save money by haying their water or hydro bills, and even their tax bills, delivered by members of their staff. In my village of Burks Falls a good many bills are delivered along the main street within a few minutes, just by handing them to the people concerned. Canada Post Corporation is trying to take this matter to court because it wants to extract its pound of flesh and its 30 cents for every bill. I hope something can be worked out so that the municipalities can continue to save money in this way.
There is no problem with the small rural post offices because anything within their radius of operations is delivered within 24 hours and sometimes even less. It is when monstrosities such as the Gateway or South Central termini and the huge sorting depots in other metropolitan areas are involved that the problems begin.
I find it rather threatening that the Government sees nothing wrong in permitting this kind of competition, and I find it frustrating that by deliberate actions it has made it necessary for the municipalities to take such steps. Years ago
November 23, 1982

there was no thought of such a thing. Bills went to the post office and were delivered at nominal cost.
There is another aspect to this matter of monopoly which I find worrisome, Mr. Speaker, and that is that in the event of a postal strike, the monopoly is not lifted. That gives not only the Canada Post Corporation but the postal unions a stranglehold on the Canadian economy. Is that what the House wants? It is not what I want and it certainly is not what the businessmen and citizens of Parry Sound-Muskoka want. We are all aware of the tragic strikes that have taken place in the past. One lasted 48 days, bankrupted a good many firms and imposed a great financial burden on others.
The Post Office Corporation has announced that rates are to be increased by two cents on February 15. To add contempt to the offence, the press releases announcing this increase were actually being distributed while the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) was using postal rates as an example of Government restraint, in one of his famous fireside chats. If governments were elected on the basis of gall instead of competence, the present one would be all but unbeatable. On the other hand, if they were elected on the basis of competence instead of smoke and mirrors, it would long since have gone the way of the United Reform Party, the Bloc Populaire and the Liberal Progressives.
Counting the 13 cent baby bonus with which it was launched then, that means that the Canadian public will have been asked to pay postal rate increases of over 88 per cent in less than a 16-month period.
Six and five is a big laugh, Mr. Speaker. The Canadian public is not blind. It knows full well that in times of inflation, prices will rise. All it asks is a little something in return. It asks for increased productivity.
To put it even more bluntly, it asks for better service. Canada Post Corporation officials trot out all kinds of statistics to show that, indeed, the service is getting better. They tell us that 88 per cent of mail, or whatever the current figure is, is delivered on time. Of course, no one has ever defined what "on time" really means. From the standpoint of the businessmen in my area in particular, it is easy to suspect that the definition of "on time" is being adjusted, rather than the service being improved. What we see from Huntsville, or from Burks Falls, is an average 11-day delivery time for a newspaper from there to Ottawa. We see the cancellation of rural Saturday deliveries and a bare-faced attempt to do away with Saturday wicket service as well. We now have a five-day rural mail delivery service. As has been mentioned by my colleagues, a great many farmers make it a point to go to town on Saturday and may want to register a letter or buy a money order. If the wicket service is reduced to five days, it will mean a hardship on them.
I hope that the Postmaster General will look at this aspect of postal service again. He should tell his colleague, Michael Warren, to keep his cotton-picking paws off closing small-town post offices on Saturday. He has done enough damage already by taking away Saturday delivery.
It is also worth mentioning that when the Prime Minister assumed office, the first-class postal rate was six cents. By the
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standards the Government has set in its management of the rest of the economy, I suppose a 553 per cent increase in rates in 15 years is not out of the way; but it is by the standards of every other Canadian Government in history. In return we have a service that, if it did not affect the profitability of every other business in the country, would be a joke.
By profession I am a real estate broker and insurance agent. In all truth, Mr. Speaker, I can tell you that today no one would expect an offer to purchase to be put in the mail and delivered within a reasonable time. They are all sent by special courier. My sons, who now operate the business as I no longer participate in it, have their salesmen drive 100 or 200 miles to deliver an offer. All across the country insurance offices no longer depend on the post office but use a regular insurance courier. The mail is picked up at the offices and delivered to Toronto within 24 hours. If it were sent through the post office, who knows how long it would take?
These are the things that worry a great many people, Mr. Speaker. Of all the Departments of Government, this is the one about which Members receive most complaints. Weekly newspapers carry advertisements complaining about the post office. When I found out that it took 11 days for delivery of the newspapers, I wrote to one paper asking it to make sure the papers were mailed on the date which appeared on the masthead. Most newspapers are sent out on a Wednesday. I checked with the post office and found that they are sent out in bags on the Wednesday but take 11 days to travel 250 miles.
I have received letters and petitions from groups of senior citizens who are incensed by the proposed two-cent increase in the cost of mailing a letter. Many other constituents have written about delays in delivery and damaged letters.
We expect much better service than this, but it does not seem that we are getting it. The motion presented today by my hon. colleague should induce the Government to pay attention to this very important service. We hope that the Canada Post Corporation will try to do a better job in the future than it has in the past.


Mr. Robert Daudlin (Essex-Kent):: Mr. Speaker, it gives me some pleasure to join briefly in this debate today, a debate which was instituted by the Hon. Member for Haldimand-Norfolk (Mr. Bradley) and just entered into by the Hon. Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka (Mr. Darling). I should like to refer to some of the comments of the Hon. Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka because I think they invited comment. I am sure he would be surprised if I did not respond, at least in some way, to some of his comments.
I, like he, have been contacted over the last weeks by a number of utility commissions, small-town services and municipalities which have considered over the last few months the possibility of direct delivery of their utility bills, tax notices and so on. I think every Hon. Member of the House has been subjected to some kind of lobby with respect to this sort of

November 23, 1982
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delivery, because obviously municipalities are concerned about costs and whether or not the extra two cents or indeed the current 30 cents will create problems for them.
By the same token, it seems to me that Elon. Members opposite are suggesting that a decision has been taken to reject all submissions made by municipalities and all those made by utility companies. 1 do not believe that could be further from truth. The Hon. Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka must know that indeed discussions were entered into which would permit some flexibility and would in fact understand, recognize and permit a mechanism whereby the delivery of such mail could take place in a preferred way. Indeed, 1 believe an announcement was made just this day in response to the request for an amendment of the definition of "letter" to deal with, among other things, bulk rates, bulk mail, the movement of securities and the use of new technology. This has been responded to, in that the new bulk rates will be payable based upon the number of letters contained in containers or given to couriers, and upon their pre-sort before delivery to Canada Post.
In addition, provisions have been made for special rates with respect to the movement of securities.
Finally-and this is of particular interest to me-organizations such as Union Gas and Consumers Gas, which have been working very closely with Canada Post, are very concerned about the new technology. I am sure the Hon. Member for Haldimand-Norfolk must be aware of the new teleprinter technology which would allow a gas meter operator to go from home to home delivering a bill to the occupant. In recognition of this, an agreement has been reached with the postal Corporation to provide for the use of this new technology. To suggest today that there is total inflexibility, that in fact a monopoly is being sought, and that there is no possibility for relief from additional pressures of added cost, quite frankly is not correct.
1 am sure my hon. friends would want me to put those comments on the record, particularly if they were not aware of them.
Whether these comments take a bit of the sting out of what they attempted to say today or whether it changes the complexion of what the Hon. Member is trying to do with his motion, I do not know, but there is no question that these comments had to be put on the record. I, for one, am particularly pleased to have been able to respond to constituents such as the Union Gas Company that have written to me and entered into negotiations directly with the postal Corporation. They are finding that it is not a great monolith, unprepared to listen to them, but is prepared to respond to the recommendations of private entrepreneurs. In fact, they are finding that the Government and the Corporation can meet their demands and concerns.
I should like to spend a few moments looking at the motion before the House, specifically as it deals with service improvement or the lack thereof, according to the Hon. Member. If the world were perfect and we had all things, I suppose all of us could have voted to have the new postal Corporation somehow wipe out all its debt, to continue to deliver mail at the rate which created the debt, to improve its service and
profile as well as the reliance upon the Corporation which people should have. I suppose we could have indicated that if it proved itself we would give it an increased rate, but this is not the kind of world in which we live. The House voted to send the postal Corporation its mandate. The time not to do it was when we had the vote. It is too late today to say that we voted to do it but we really did not want to, that we were kind of forced to and thought things would be better. I cannot accept such reasoning. We all voted as reasoning persons. We recognized that indeed we were imposing a great difficulty upon the postal Corporation, but we asked it to deal with its debt. It seems to me that Canada Post is dealing with it reasonably and that it is continuing to try to provide a service. Also it seems to me that we are not asking for the payment of that service by very difficult and expensive methods or in a disproportionate way.
If we asked people in the remote areas of Canada to pay the true cost of the delivery service, which I agree they have the right to expect, would they use it or be able to pay for it? Does it not seem reasonable that if we are to demand a service in remote areas, the beneficiaries of mail delivery elsewhere should somehow be required to pay for a portion of the cost of remote distance delivery?
In addition, I ask Hon. Members whether they truly believe that there has not been an improvement in service. After only a few months of officially gaining its status as a Crown Corporation, a status which permits Canada Post to operate as a business and without the trammels imposed by several Government Departments, it announced that 74,751 new homes and businesses across Canada would be served by some 170 additional letter carriers. Many of these calls became operational by April 1 of this year. This increased service represented the first major expansion of mail delivery service since the Government tightened financial controls in 1978-79. The improvement in mail delivery represented a $5.5 million investment in the provision of faster and more accessible mail services.
I and many Members of the House argued with some validity that there were many areas in our constituencies that by any criteria deserved increased service. At the same time we argued that somehow it had to be found within the confines of restraints. This was done. To argue today that this is not an increase in service, which should be lauded as having been accomplished by the postal Corporation, is not to acknowledge what has truthfully taken place.
The expansion of mail delivery took place right across Canada. It was not isolated to only one or two communities. Also it took place with due regard for the public purse, and the financial bottom line is a key to further progress in the mails. Canada Post's No. 1 priority is to improve service; 1 think the chairman of the Corporation indicated that. Its aim is to provide a service second to none in the mails.
Accordingly, one of the first things it did once it became a Corporation was to set up six action programs called "quick starts". It staffed teams with some of its best managers and
November 23, 1982

told them to attack immediately six critical areas where Canada Post had to intervene quickly in straightening out operations and moving the mails more expeditiously. These quick starts have paid off handsomely in boosting over-all performance.
I should like to offer Hon. Members some evidence as to where they have started to pay off. A user's guide for large volume mailers was produced and distributed. By working more closely on pre-sort and make-up requirements, Canada Post now saves time and money, which is reflected throughout the system. A turnaround team dealing with mis-sorts and mis-sends has been auditing 371 mechanized plants and postal stations. Quality control teams are checking very carefully to ensure that these miscues are corrected as quickly as possible.
Several new transportation routes have been set up to move the mail faster between high density centres. If the mail movement between my constituency and Ottawa, for example, is any test of whether or not this is working, then I have to suggest that it is.
These initiatives and others are all directed by a special body called the Service Improvement Group. It has taken over the implementation of the quick start programs and it has been charged with the responsibility of seeing that the work continues on schedule.
Canada Post also set up another group that combines senior executives from both marketing and operations to tap the ideas of first-line supervisors and managers. Canada Post was swamped with letters and memos from its own employees who really want to contribute to service improvements. They are sending in their ideas, and management is acting on many of them.
Let me cite a few specific examples of changes that are now taking place. In Calgary, a special project team is improving delivery times for processing mail from large volume mailers. In Vancouver, Canada Post adjusted the times when letter boxes are cleared to provide earlier processing at the plant. Parcel delivery in Edmonton has been reorganized, improving service by about 25 per cent. In Quebec, Canada Post redesigned some of its special delivery routes. It is beginning to improve performance in mail going to the western part of that Province. In the Atlantic postal region, sales territories have been redrawn to ensure maximum sales initiatives at minimum cost.
All of these initiatives, the quick starts, the longer term projects and the response they have generated from managers, have given the Corporation a good beginning. Canada Post is moving on a wide front, and its success so far is due to many people working a little harder or a little more smartly to improve service. Canada Post will not become a success overnight, which I do not think any Member expected, but I believe that the turnaround has begun. I suggest that the evidence is there for all of us to see.
During the past year, Canada Post has also decided to take on its most formidable competitors in the courier business. Exploiting its great advantage of having more outlets than
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most, 8,000 across the country, Canada Post expanded Priority Post, its premier courier service, in major cities across Canada. Businesses are learning that important mail can and will be delivered on time and reliably. Canada Post takes pride in the growing success that this premium courier service is enjoying.
Incidentally, I might just tell the House that only last week, one of my constituents who was leaving the country and required his passport very quickly, requested-not because he particularly distrusted Canada Post but because he wanted to ensure quick delivery-that a specific courier, whom he named, be used to have his passport delivered from my constituency office. The fact is that the courier service on which everyone relied lost the passport, and we were required to do special duty in order to obtain another passport for him.
This just proves that notwithstanding the fact that far fewer pieces are sorted and delivered by that courier service, they also have miscues, misdirections and misdeliveries. It is unreasonable to expect that there will not be these misadventures.
When one looks at the number of pieces that Canada Post has to deal with each year versus the number of pieces that, in fact, do get misdirected, I do not think that any reasonable person can do anything but suggest that Canada Post is doing a very good job. I want to stand here and compliment them for what they do right, while recognizing that they are also there to receive my complaints when they do something wrong and, better still, are prepared to correct it.
Let us examine the performance of the less esoteric types of mail that almost every Canadian receives or sends out. Since becoming a Crown Corporation in October of 1981, Canada Post has focused most of its efforts on its top priority, which is to improve postal service to its customers. Changes in mail handling procedures, new transportation routes and improved controls over the national networks are just a few of the service initiatives that have been and are being applied. Consider the results of these initiatives. For August, 1982, on time delivery of first class mail was 88.7 per cent, compared with 80.4 per cent in the same period in 1980. This represents the highest monthly average that Canada Post has attained since 1976. It is true that we would like to see figures of 95 per cent or 98 per cent, but the fact is that there has been some improvement. I suggest that this proves my point that the suggestion in today's motion that there has been no improvement in services does not reflect what in fact has been happening.
Local first class mail, letters mailed within a city for delivery within the same area, had a success rate of 94.6 per cent. Forward first class mail, letters mailed for delivery in a different city, improved by 13 points. In most of the other areas sampled, mail service showed a substantial improvement over the levels of the previous year. I wonder whether, if other private sector corporations had shown that type of improvement in productivity and delivery of their goods or service, they would not just be a little proud of that and also somewhat concerned about critics still saying that they are doing it wrong.

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Indisputably, Canada Post's performance has improved, is improving and shows every sign of continuing to improve. Improvement means change, and this is not brought about by the fainthearted. Daring and refreshing changes are taking place in Canada Post, which accounts for the mails being moved more expeditiously and with greater dispatch.
The new mail handling techniques are not the only explanation for improved mail delivery. Not only has Canada Post taken a fresh look at how to improve service and productivity, but smoother and more cordial labour relations are leading to a new pride among the 60,000 employees. They are beginning to realize that they belong to a class organization that is vital to the economic well-being of the nation and vital to the strength of its social fabric. A renewed pride and spirit is not the least of Canada Post's achievements and performance over the past year.
Let me reassure you, Mr. Speaker, that despite progress and achievement, Canada Post has not become smug. It fully realizes that innumerable challenges lie ahead, that only unstinting daily efforts by both management and labour can bring about a truly superlative mail service. That is the aim of the Corporation, to provide a truly superlative mail service that does not rely on the public purse. Even though the results still fall short of the standards set by the Corporation, it is clear that the revitalizing of this essential national service is well under way.
Canada Post has also made a commitment to the public and to the House. It will continue to release reports on mail service, such as the one I cited above, on a regular basis regardless of the results. I think that reflects a lot of confidence in the future by this Corporation.
The survival of Canada Post as a business is not just a concern about daily operational realities. Canada Post, while it has entered the space age, still has to look at the mails of the future. It is well aware that this is the age of the microchip and electronic wizardry that is revolutionizing communications everywhere. Canada Post recently established a business development division which is keeping the Corporation attuned to the latest developments in technology.
Canada Post is also well aware of the fact that it has to reposition its parcel services and to explore all the avenues opening up in electronic mail. It realizes that it has to find new ways to better use its more than 8,000 branch offices if it is to increase revenues substantially.
Canada Post is examining the introduction of a proof of delivery feature to telepost messages. Incidentally, telepost is that electronic mail service operated jointly with CN and CP Telecommunications. This proof of delivery feature would provide accurate records without sacrificing efficiency. The Corporation is also studying ways of providing a two to three hour delivery service across Canada to the approximately 50 communities where telepost facilies exist.
I must refer to Canada Post's approach in expanding its business and improving its performance. It has adopted the attitude that it must aggressively compete in the marketplace
for more business and revenue. This attitude that it must be aggressive and competitive underlies the record of increasing success that I have mentioned before. While some Members may hark back to the golden age of perfection in the mails, Canada Post knows full well that in terms of superior performance it cannot go forward unless it adopts the methods and attitudes of its most formidable competitors.
In conclusion I might suggest that some of my questions are addressed to that stance. I think much of what is at stake here is a continuation of the universal mail service in Canada. Such universal mail service is jealously guarded by governments of all countries, and it gives one pause to wonder just a bit why, in fact, this particular Government and this particular country should be different.
Canada Post has often been criticized with the same adjectives that are used to criticize business. 1 consider that to be a sign that the mails are now operating as a business, and 1 welcome it. Such criticism augurs well for the future of improved mail performance in Canada.


Mr. Ron Stewart (Simcoe South):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in support of this motion brought forward by my colleague, the Hon. Member for Norfolk-Haldimand (Mr. Bradley). It is also very nice to see just what an impact he had on the Government today when it had to bring in amended regulations today so that we could get another shot at the Government and so that we would not have such a terrible definition of a "letter".


André Ouellet: It was done before.


Ronald Alexander Stewart: It does not say that. It says November 23. I think the Minister must have suffered a little trepidation when the notice came out today.


Lyle Stuart Kristiansen: You buccaneers have had your chance again.


Ronald Alexander Stewart: In today's press release Mr. Warren stated: "In the preparation of most government regulations, there is no requirement for a process of public consultation". The press release went on to state:
This will require that the revised regulation be regazetted early in December 1982. "This way, a minimum of sixty days will be available to obtain any further public reaction to the revised regulation", the President of Canada Post said.
I wonder if the government would seriously consider changing the regulation so that it makes some sense. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that the definition of a letter is, "A written or printed message addressed to a person, or persons, usually sent by post or messenger, and fairly long". The definition of a letter, which we hope will be withdrawn, states that it is "any mailable matter, in any form, whose weight does not exceed 500 grams, whether or not enclosed in an envelope, and intended for transmission to any destination or delivery to any addressee in Canada".


Arnold John Malone: Don't send a note across the House.
November 23, 1982


Ronald Alexander Stewart: I had prepared a long dissertation in opposition to exactly what that definition said, but, hopefully, it will not be required. We have all heard the little, old adage:
A tisket, a tasket
A brown and yellow basket,
1 sent a letter to my love
But on the way the post office lost it-
And it cost me 30 cents.
We have all experienced this on a regular basis. In my offices, both here and in my riding, I personally get more mail with regard to the faulty post office service than with regard to any other item which crosses my desk.
In October of last year, when the Canada Post Corporation came into being, the president of the new corporation, Michael Warren, listed three goals for the following five years. The first was the aim of having the mail delivered on time. I am sure he said that with tongue in cheek. Second was the plan to place the Corporation in a financial break-even position. That was the first time I had ever heard of anyone who wanted to run a corporation and just make it break even. That is not the way the free enterprise system works, in my view. I just received a letter the other day which stated:
Dear Ron:
Here's another little s-disturber for you. I certainly wouldn't mind paying the postage in Canada if we had the service. The last letter I received from Bruce took three weeks. It used to take a week. We get one down here in five days.
That letter came from Florida with a U.S. postage stamp. Mr. Warren said that the second plan was to break even. I might add that the clipping which was attached to the letter came from a Florida newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel, dated November 3, 1982 and the by-line is Los Angeles. It states:
The U.S. Postal Service made money in fiscal 1982 and a postal rate increase projected for late 1983 will be put off until 1984, Postmaster General William Bolger said.
Letters in the United States require only a 20 cent stamp, yet the U.S. post office makes a profit. That is a little different from what we are asked to accept here by Mr. Warren. Third, he hoped to establish a closer relationship with the Corporation's eight unions. I am sure that every person in Canada wishes him well and, as has been pointed out by my colleague, the Hon. Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka (Mr. Darling), both with CUPE and some of the others, he has his work cut out for him, but we do wish him well. These goals of efficiency and self-sufficiency were admirable, but right from the beginning it was recognized that the attainment of these aims would result in internal upheaval and in additional financial burden on the users of the postal service, because when costs outrun revenues by that much, then things do not run on time and service must suffer. Thus, the fact that both these problems have surfaced should come as no surprise to any of us.
What has been a surprise, a most unwelcome surprise, I might add, and an unwarranted one at that, is that the factors contributing to the creation of these problems led to a reduction and not an expansion of the existing services as was expected. We are now paying more for something and getting
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less. We are paying First World price for service, but we are getting Third World class in service.


André Ouellet: That's not your quote.


Ronald Alexander Stewart: Mail delivery on Saturday, in rural areas, which is considered an important and vital service to those involved, has been eliminated. Despite official claims that on time delivery of first class mail has improved, senders and receivers right across the country, and everyone who spoke here have a litany of horror stories. We all know better than to think that service has been expanded. News stories of mail taking days to reach its destination in the same city remain frequent and have led to public frustration, and the continuing annoyance and anger of the public is not without substance. Proof of this attitude can be found in the Corporation's own figures which reveal that the usage of the service has dropped noticeably. Canadians who had expected improvements and should have seen improvements, have now had their hopes dashed again and, in disgust, have turned to alternative services where possible.
What has been the Corporation's response to those defections? It chose to legislate rather than to entice. It sought to expand upon its monopoly rather than to improve its service. I hope this announcement will give the Corporation its second sober thought that we hear so much about. It has sought to expand its monopolies rather than improve its services, and then it redefined "a letter" which we have already gone through.
That redefinition of "a letter" upsets so many Canadians that it actually alienated them even further, and the response to this arbitrary definition was predictable. Strong and angry opposition was heard from the financial community, from business, consumer groups, the municipalities and the public in general. The Minister responsible for Canada Post, who is seated across the aisle, has received over 300 representations since the last I heard, and I would bet there are many more by today, concerning the complete matter. Therefore, there could have been no doubt in the minds of Government Members opposite when this was brought to their attention today that they had better do something about it, and do it quickly.
The first intimation that the Corporation was looking to grab extra bucks where it could, came when the proposed definition of "a letter" was published in the Canada Gazette on July 3. The public was given 60 days to respond, as we are aware, and will now have 60 more days. This is the first time since the issue came to public attention in over four months that the Government has had the decency to respond, prompted, I presume, by today's opposition. Only today, when forced to speak to the issue because the Official Opposition selected the topic for debate, did the Minister responsible for the Corporation finally get around to ending the form and climate of uncertainty which has existed since the definition was announced. It has taken the Government four months to come to its senses and agree not to support this disastrous definition. I wish it had done the same with regard to metric.

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For this tardy yet welcome response, we can be grateful. However, the Minister has stated that the Government itself will be bringing forward its own regulations on the issue some time in the spring. Knowing the Government's penchant for dipping into people's pockets on even the barest pretext, I am not so sure that the Government's own definition of "regulations governing the Corporation's mandate" will not result in an equally odious proposal. Let us hope not.
It is to be hoped that the Government will take serious note of the obligations raised over the definition of "a letter" when it begins to form its own rules. It should pay attention to the fact that the business community has taken strong exception to any further penalties being placed on it in connection with the use of courier services. In the case of my own business, I would have had to break the law to continue to deliver my statements of account to my customers. The business community is absolutely beleaguered by a chaotic economic climate, and it relies on rapid transit of its transactions to remain current and solvent. There seems to have been no consideration of that fact taken into account. In the absence of reliable public postal service, many businesses have turned to private couriers for this vital asset of their operations. The Government, when creating the Corporation, was aware that if it banned couriers or made their use prohibitive, it would face an absolutely embarrassing revolt by business. All the letters we have received have affirmed that. Therefore, couriers were permitted to operate, but it was stipulated that the fee involved had to be at least three times the cost of sending a letter by mail, which has been pointed out by my colleague, the Hon. Member for Parry Sound-Muskoka. The fact that thousands of Canadian businesses chose to accept this exhorbitant rate, rather than use the mail, attests to their lack of confidence in the postal service. The Corporation, with its back to the financial wall, instead of improving service to entice such users back into its fold, sought to further penalize those who out of necessity turned to other services.
Now we come to the matter of electronic transmission, which I am sure must come up again. While electronic mail is exempt during transmission, the proposed definition which we had before us appeared to mean that once a paper copy of the transmission had been made, the paper copy was then considered a letter, and postage had to be paid. Absolutely idiotic. Anyone could realize instantly just what was happening, and what a financial nightmare this would become, for businesses to have to pay for services that were not rendered. One wonders about the mentality responsible for this type of thinking. It reminds me of the metric issue. The Government was right finally to refuse to accept such a dumb definition of a letter. I wish that they could reconsider the metric question.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Ronald Alexander Stewart: The refusal was appropriate on many counts, not the least of which was the regulation involving punishment for non-compliance. Mandatory definition of a letter at this point, mandatory use of metric, and the threat to Canadians of
something not debated properly in the House of Commons, not gone to committees, is the threat of imprisonment. That is something we have to keep in our minds, that by Order in Council it is legal now in the wonderful country of Canada to have internment camps.
There was a provision which stated that any violator could be prosecuted by indictment or summary conviction and given anything from a fine to five years in prison. Is that not really something for us to believe in that in this country of Canada you could actually get a prison sentence for violating such a simple thing as a letter. It is interesting to note that any time the Government or its agencies introduce new legislation it seems, lately, there is always inserted that threat of imprisonment. This is quite possibly one of the reasons why the Government laid the groundwork for the establishment of internment camps under the Emergency Measures Order, as it was passed by Order in Council.
This Government is becoming famous, or infamous, as the case may be, for threatening to put Canadians in jail if they do not do what the Government orders. Mandatory imposition has become the rule, not the exception. Canadians do not deserve to be behind bars. The people who consider that they had to use that threat maybe should take their place.
The very fact that the regulation was proposed in the first place should indicate to the Government that something is terribly wrong with the direction being implemented by senior officials of Canada Post. The goals I first reiterated are commendable. The methods being used to obtain those goals are not.
There was a time when mail delivery in Canada was the envy of other nations around the world. The words, "Royal Mail", on trucks, street boxes, uniforms and buildings seemed to signify a type of treatment being given the transmission and delivery of letters and parcels. For a few pennies at most, our mail was delivered swiftly and intact. The post office then had a well-deserved reputation. I worked as a postman at Christmastime, as a youth in high school, and as a summer job, and I know how important that oath was to all of us and how we would scamper all over that post office when we could not ascertain where a letter should be delivered, to make sure that it got to its rightful owner. The "Royal Mail" was given "royal" attention. Why do we then find ourselves in the mess we are in today?
It is perhaps no coincidence that our sorry lapse into the present state of affairs began when this Government, in an effort to stamp out all references to the word "royal", included the Post Office in its fevered and foolish rush to establish a hyphenated Canada as the questionable mark of our national and independent identity. Small wonder, then, that the Government exhibits no alarm over the arrogance of Canada Post officials. When you abandon tradition, you also turn your back on the values such tradition engenders. These values, and the result of attempts to live up to such values, provided the nation with services in many areas which were second to none. The handling of our "royal" mail was a prime example. When the
November 23, 1982

Government eliminated the word "royal it seemed to signal an abandonment of the type of service implicit in the word.
Thrust into the void, Canada Post has created new types of service, priority post, intelpost and telepost, all designed simply to generate more money for the Corporation not better service, only more money.
The price increase in stamps is the next thing 1 would like to look at for a moment. When the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) came to office stamps were 6 cents. At the end of 1981 the price rose to 30 cents a stamp, up from 17 cents, an increase of 88 per cent. We did not get a corresponding increase in the quality of service. Another increase, to 32 cents, is set to take place this coming February 15. We have four more years to go before the goal of self-sufficiency is achieved. You don't have to be a mathematician to realize how much higher the price of postage stamps will have to go before this goal is realized. The President of Canada Post has said that the next increase would have been much higher, but he was forced to remain within the Government's six and five guidelines. In the meantime I understand Great Britain's post office is running at a profit, and you have just heard that the United States is actually postponing a price increase.
Two years down the road the President of Canada Post will undoubtedly find a way to make up for the loss resulting from the period of imposed restraint. By that time the five or six people left using the service will be faced with a postage stamp worth more than the dollar it costs to buy it. Mr. Warren is not worried, why should he be? No single person, in my view, is worth a salary of between $100,000 and $150,000, who does not generate productivity. I would suggest that if Mr. Warren wants to be a winner he should set aside his personal goal and give his undivided attention to the manner in which he pursues the three goals which he stated for the Corporation.
In Hansard on July 19, 1982, at page 19439, under Standing Order 43, I was referring to the difficulty of mail delivery to one of my constituents. The suggestion I made then was that the cost of each registered letter not delivered within 48 hours be deducted from the salary of the President of Canada Post, and perhaps he would recognize the plight of Canadians with regard to their postal service. That still stands.
Relations between Canada Post employees and management have deteriorated to a point of almost constant confrontation, and the public has borne the brunt and the cost of this conflict. To dwell on the labour-management issue at this point would serve no purpose. The issues of contention are well documented and widely known. What we are looking for are answers and improvements.
By implementing policies which would create confidence in the service, by delivering the mail on time and intact, the management of Canada Post and its employees would certainly earn the respect of Canadians. To ask this Government to appreciate the necessity of public respect is perhaps asking too much. The Post Office, on the other hand, was once a respected institution. I would suggest to officials that too much time
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and effort has been wrongly directed to the definition of a letter, and that in the ensuing time that we have, when this goes back for a change, that it be struck from their minds.
I would further suggest that they study very carefully the dictionary definition of "service". The Oxford Dictionary tells us that service is the work done to meet a need. The need exists. I defy any Member of this House to go out on the street tonight and ask 20 Canadians what they think about their post office, and to tabulate the answers and bring them back to the House.
Someone must ensure that the work to meet this need is done. That someone is this Government. Because this Government has failed miserably in its effort to provide this service, I wholeheartedly support the motion before us today.
[Translation] *


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: Order, please. I have the honour to inform the House that I have received the following communication:

I have the honour to inform the House that a communication has been received which is as follows: "Dear Mr. Blaker: Amongst birthday greetings headed your way, may ours add its bit towards a wonderful day. Hoping that your birthday joys will last the whole year through". It is signed by several Members.
I have to indicate that Hon. Members who have not taken the trouble to sign these greetings, such as the Minister for Consumer and Corporate Affairs (Mr. Ouellet) or the Hon. Member from Winnipeg North (Mr. Orlikow) or the Hon. Member from Bow River (Mr. Taylor), will of course not be recognized for the purpose of debate until the year 1983.


Arnold John Malone: Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. I want you to know that I mailed your greeting a year ago, on your birthday, for this year.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: It being six o'clock I do now leave the chair until eight o'clock this evening.
At 6 p.m. the House took recess.


[Stage Direction]
AFTER RECESS

The House resumed at 8 p.m.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: When the House rose at six o'clock, the Hon. Member for Winnipeg North (Mr. Orlikow) was expected to have the floor and does now have the floor for 20 minutes.


David Orlikow: Mr. Speaker, when in 1980 the Post Office was changed-


Mr. Berger:: Mr. Speaker, 1 rise on a point of order. As l recall, prior to the adjournment of the House this afternoon, a

November 23, 1982
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Member of the Official Opposition was speaking. Earlier this afternoon I was speaking to the Deputy Speaker-1 am not sure whether it was the Deputy or the Assistant Deputy Speaker. He said that after the first round, the order was to go back and forth between the Opposition and the Government. We are of the understanding that after the Official Opposition it is to be a Member of our Party who is to speak first this evening.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Blaker):: The Hon. Member for Laurier (Mr. Berger) is quite correct. At six o'clock I did not in fact recognize the next Hon. Member to speak, although I expressed every intention in that regard because the Hon. Member for Winnipeg North was on his feet. At that time the Hon. Member for Welland (Mr. Parent) was not in the Chamber. While it is not the regular order of speakers, I do not have a choice but to accept the fact that the Hon. Member for Winnipeg North stood in his place at that time, and in good faith I have to recognize him. After him I will be recognizing the Hon. Member for Welland.


David Orlikow: Mr. Speaker, when in 1980 the Government finally brought in legislation which turned the Post Office from a Government Department into a Crown corporation, that proposal had almost unanimous approval from all Members of this House. That consensus came about because the experience of a dozen or more years with the Post Office being run as a Department of Government was so bad that the public and Members of Parliament recognized that a very drastic and fundamental change would have to be made.
What were the reasons of the decline of the popularity of the Post Office? There was, of course, a tremendous increase in the amount of mail which the Post Office was called upon to move. The Government decided on the advice of some so-called experts that the way to handle this tremendous increase was to mechanize and computerize the system. Instead of trying the new system in a smaller city to find out whether and how it worked, the Government installed the new system in the Toronto area where 40 per cent of all mail originates.
It was several years after the computerized system was installed before all the bugs were found and the difficulties eliminated. Indeed, they may not have been eliminated until now. For a long time we had a situation where Toronto mail was shipped by truck to Peterborough to be sorted by hand, brought back to Toronto and then sent on to its destination. People became very angry. One could not blame them. They were justified in their anger, but they vented it on the wrong people. They assumed that the difficulties and failures were somehow due to the Post Office workers, when in fact they were the responsibility of management which had made such fundamental errors.
Besides that we had management backed by a Government which simply refused to deal with its employees in a twentieth century way in face-to-face discussion, looking for solutions to the difficulties and differences which arose. Over the years there were a number of strikes, some legal and some not.
A number of studies were commissioned by the Government. Judge Montpetit, Stewart Martin and several others all
reported that the difficulties were as a result of bad management practices in the Department. Then, Mr. Speaker, there was the added difficulty that the Post Office Department, and its Minister, could not negotiate with the unions. That job was given to the Treasury Board, which was always concerned about how a particular improvement or concession would affect other people. After many years it was decided that the Post Office should be transformed into a Crown corporation, and, as I said earlier, that decision was endorsed by virtually all the Members of Parliament. Our Party supported that change because we believed then, and we believe now, that it was a change which was needed. We believe that the people of Canada want and have a right to expect an efficient, affordable and equitable mail service. We consider the post office should be a national public utility supported by the people of Canada. We are dealing with the deficit by constantly increasing the price of mailing letters or magazines and newspapers. This is wrong in principle. One might as well say, Mr. Speaker, that if the people of the cities or the rural areas cannot afford to pay for health services directly, they should not have health services, and if the people of an isolated community, for example, in northern Manitoba, cannot afford to pay for the cost of teachers in their schools, they should not have schools. The delivery of mail, letters, magazines, books, newspapers, is a right of all Canadians and the cost should be borne equitably by all Canadians. The price for delivery of a letter within the City of Winnipeg should not be any higher than the price for delivering a letter to the Northwest Territories, a difference of thousands of miles, nor should the price be lower.
We recognize that as a part of the improvement in service an increase in rates was necessary, but we feel the amount of the increase since the change-over to the Crown Corporation has been unfair and violates the Corporation's duty to provide good service to all sectors of Canadian society at reasonable rates. I point out that the cost of mailing a first-class letter in Canada has risen in two years from 17 cent to 32 cents. That is an increase, Mr. Speaker, of almost 90 per cent. At the same time service to individuals has been reduced.
We have heard mention of closing some rural post offices on Saturdays, and there are rumours about a three-day service instead of five-day service, and I could go on and on. We know, for example, that letter carriers have been cut back on overtime, which means, of course, that service to individual homes is reduced. We are told it has been recommended in the post office that no substitutes be provided for sick or otherwise indisposed letter carriers. This recommendation is widely believed to be the first step toward ending the five-day delivery service and a consideration of an every-other-day delivery service.
We know that the average family who may send and receive only a few letters per week pays the highest rate as first-class mail costs go up, but the level of their service is gradually being reduced. On the other hand, Mr. Speaker, the Canada
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Post Corporation is bending over backwards to encourage corporate mailing by offering more services and proportionately passing on lower rate increases for first-class service. If it were not against the rules of the House, 1 would bring into the House the mail which comes to my office, and which comes to every Member of this House of Commons every day. It would take a very large cardboard carton. And I know, as well as the Minister, that 95 per cent of the mail which we get goes into the garbage.


Ian Deans: Because half of it comes from that Minister.


David Orlikow: My colleague, the Hon. Member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Deans), says that half of it comes from that Minister. I will not blame him for that much, but there is a great deal of junk mail received, and not only by Members of Parliament. Every household in Canada receives advertising, flyers and catalogues which they do not ask for. All this junk mail received by Canadian citizens is largely financed by the taxpayer, involuntarily through subsidization given by the Canada Post Corporation, with the approval of the Government and the Minister, while the cost of first-class mail, which is so important to the ordinary citizen, has been increased by almost 100 per cent.
The people who work for the Canada Post Corporation, or for any Government Department or agency, have been asked to accept wage increases well below the cost of living. The postal workers have been directed by the Government, through passage of a Bill supported by Hon. Members of the Conservative Official Opposition, as well as the Liberals to accept a 6 per cent maximum increase in their wages this year and 5 per cent in the next year, while the cost of living is still rising by 10 per cent. It is not likely that the cost of living will come down below 9 per cent in the next four of five months, therefore, the workers in the post office have been ordered to accept a reduction in their real take-home pay. At the same time as they have had imposed on them a maximum 6 per cent increase in their wages, first-class mail rates have increased by over 75 per cent. Point out that first-class mail represented losses of just 23 per cent on the cost of providing service at the same time as business bulk mailing represented losses of 42 per cent for third-class mail and 130 per cent for fourth-class mail.
I would like the Minister at some time, if not today, to explain to Members of this House and the Canadian public why they should be forced to pay an increase of almost 100 per cent. I suppose within the next year we will reach or exceed the magic number of 100 per cent. At the same time, business mail, most of which is unsolicited and most of which I classify as junk mail, is showing the kind of losses and getting the kind of subsidies from the Government and the people of Canada which it does.


Ian Deans: All written off against taxes.


David Orlikow: Mr. Speaker, in the current period the Canada Post Corporation is announcing a set of rates for corporations. Our position is that more attention should be focused on the
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need of individual Canadians and small businessmen. What is a more efficient postal service? Our response would be a service which provides a basic customary postal service to the greatest possible number of Canadians, whether they live on the prairies or the far North, or an individual in northern Manitoba.
Let me digress for a moment, Mr. Speaker, to deal very briefly with some of the arguments advanced during this debate and earlier in committee when we were passing the legislation to establish the Crown Corporation.
We have the argument that the Government and the post office were being too restrictive in their definition of a letter. The argument was advanced that we should not restrict the definition of a letter; we need more competition. Those people who say that, Mr. Speaker, are doing a great disservice to Canadians, particularly to Canadians who live in the bigger cities of this country. If you got the so-called competition which some of the banks and other commercial organizations want, Mr. Speaker, you would have those organizations skimming off the easy and cheap to deliver mail in the big cities. What would be left for the post office? All the difficult mail, all the rural and isolated areas where the cost to deliver mail is very expensive. Then you would get the argument that the Postal Corporation could not afford to provide the kind of service it has been providing until now. You would get further cutbacks in service in the rural and isolated areas, as we have had cutbacks in VIA rail service. So we say that we want the post office to be efficient and able to deliver mail quickly, without the mistakes which have happened before.
However, Mr. Speaker, we do not believe that efficiency means subsidizing corporate business structure, which is interested in selling its goods by getting a subsidy from the people of Canada. We believe that a step in the right direction for the kind of program I have talked about would be a clear definition of what basic customary postal service really means.
I say to the Minister that it means, in the cities and suburbs of Canada, door-to-door delivery. It does not mean delivery to letter boxes in suburban areas which may be a mile or more from where people live. We had that situation right into the 1979 election. The fact that an election was looming is what got the Government to agree to the hiring of more letter carriers. 1 do not know whether it is going to need another election, but we need to get the kind of door-to-door service to the suburbs that the cities have had for many years. If we do, then we would have a much better basis for judging proposed cuts in delivery service, the refusal to provide home delivery in certain areas, the closing of post offices in smaller centres and outlying areas, and the increasingly inflated costs for first-class service.
That is the kind of approach we need, Mr. Speaker. What we need is for the Government and Parliament of Canada to give that kind of directive or objective to the Crown Corporation, to let them know what we expect from them. What we expect is that they meet the needs of ordinary citizens and

November 23, 1982
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their right to mail and receive ordinary letters quickly, efficiently, and at a reasonable cost, rather than the staggering increases we have had in recent years.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Gilbert Parent (Welland):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to address myself to a few statements made earlier in the debate by the Hon. Member for Simcoe South (Mr. Stewart) who sits across the aisle. He said that this Government will be tabling a definition of "a letter" in the very near future. The fact is that it is the Corporation which will be tabling this definition. Not only that, there will be 60 days for the public to respond. If they have any problems with the definition, then there is still time for change at that time.
The Hon. Member also said that the Cabinet is probably making a decision about the definition because of the debate taking place today. 1 suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that this is not so. The Cabinet has been having extensive consultations across Canada, and this is the latest possible time Cabinet could make the decision in order to hear all possible views and get all possible input from all the people across Canada. I would suggest in turn that it is quite possible that the Members of the Conservative Party probably chose this topic to coincide with the decision taken by Cabinet. That is a possibility, in fact even a probability.
It was also mentioned by the Hon. Member that the post office lacked flexibility. Well, Mr. Speaker, the post office has been negotiating with industry's bulk mailers, and 1 would like to read a quotation from Friday's wire services which says:
Manitoba Hydro will save about $100,000 a year because of new Canada Post Corp., rates for bulk mail, Hydro spokesman Verne Prior said Friday.
Another one from Toronto says that:
Proposed rates for bulk mailing recently approved by Canada Post Corp. could save utilities in Ontario about $2 million next year-
That is right, $2 million. You shake your head in wonderment, Mr. Speaker, and no wonder indeed because $2 million is surely nothing to be sneezed at. Charlie Macaluso, a research officer with the Ontario Municipal Electrical Association says:
I think we've developed probably one of the better understandings and cooperative arrangements with the post office ever.
That Association, Mr. Speaker, represents more than 300 of Ontario's 324 municipal utilities. Not only that, Mr. Speaker, we had people who were in times past greatly affected by the mail strikes of the post office. But now we see that the Canada Post Corporation and the greeting card industry have undertaken a joint study to look at an appropriate rate for Christmas cards for next Christmas. This recommendation will be brought forward by January, 1983 to assist the greeting card industry.
So quite contrary to what the Hon. Member was saying earlier about the inflexibility of the Post Office, I suggest to you that the Post Office indeed is adjusting to the problems of the times. It is not only giving better service for the money but is also taking greater care to ensure that the mail is being delivered on time.
I should like to address myself to the improved labour relations at Canada Post Corporation and the improved reliability of delivery of mail. The Opposition motion states that there is no proof that service has improved since the post office became a Crown corporation a year ago. 1 beg to differ. There is one very tangible way in which service has improved over 1980 and 1981.
In 1980, the Post Office suffered a two-month strike which not only crippled our Canadian postal system and sent business scurrying for emergency arrangements to move mail, but which cost the Department a loss of more than 660,000 person days. In 1981, work disruptions of various kinds, short of a general strike, cost more than 14,000 person days. In 1982, I am happy to report, there have been less than 100 person days lost through work disruptions to date.
Now, Mr. Speaker, no single factor contributes more to service deterioration than work disruptions or strikes. Therefore, we can certainly say that it is with service improvement in mind-or more precisely, with an improvement in the reliability of service-that management at Canada Post, with the support of the Government, has pursued a very creative approach to union-management relations. The purpose is to improve those relations, and the dramatic drop in person days lost through either a strike or work disruptions certainly points to the efficiency of the approach.
These improved results are not the product of a fluke. The Corporation's management set out to balance its three basic objectives of improved service, improved human relations and the achievement of self-sufficiency in such a way as to avoid situations which could escalate into work disruptions. When we consider the climate under which the Corporation is operating these days, with volume drops from the recession, wage guidelines and stressed labour relations all around, we can appreciate the delicate balancing act which is required.
The extensive cost-cutting and savings operations which Canada Post has had to pursue in order to meet its mandate which calls for a reduction of its deficit, have added a great deal of stress to the working environment. And yet, the Corporation is ending its first year of operations with a loss of less than 100 person days. I think this is a phenomenal achievement, when compared to the 660,000 person days lost in 1980.
The present situation is that about 97 per cent of employees at Canada Post are unionized, and this includes most supervisors and managers. In the last decade, the post office was the scene of some intense union-management discord. The result is that there is now a public perception that this counterproductive environment is standard operating procedure. One of the toughest jobs at Canada Post, therefore, is to follow a program which addresses the problems honestly and which works towards changing attitudes and practices. It is these attitudes and practices which must be attacked. There must be a change in the way employees and employers work, so that efficient mail delivery can be achieved.
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Why the situation developed in the first place is not an easy question to answer. However, Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that the Canada Post Act, which all Members in this House supported, was meant to change past practices dramatically. I stress that virtually every Member voted in favour of establishing the Canada Post Corporation.
Until October 16, 1981, there were three employers dealing with the unions in the negotiating process at the post office. The Department of Finance, which set fiscal policy for the country and had the over-all financial mandate for negotiations; the Treasury Board, which did the bargaining and was, in law, the employer; and, finally, the post office which ran the business from day to day. Each of these three employers had different objectives and the process was, to put it mildly, awkward.
Moreover, the bargaining process was extremely formal; it was almost quasi-judicial in nature. Under the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the normal conciliation services designed to facilitate freely negotiated settlements in the private sector were not available to the post office. In their place came imposed settlements, made by arbitrators, Parliament and even the courts. Even after some of these imposed agreements, the issues often remained as points to be squabbled over within the organization.
The Corporation now can negotiate directly with labour representatives. This new climate has already affected the spirit at Canada Post. The Corporation has begun to cast off some of the counter-productive emotional baggage of previous negotiations, such as removing or brushing away the longstanding problems of cumbersome grievance procedures, salary inequities, lack of co-ordination in safety programs and other things.
The Canada Post Act gave the post office a new lease on life. It would seem that the fresh start provided by Crown status is showing some results. Certainly, Mr. Speaker, there are still a lot of problems to be resolved, but at least they are being discussed without the acrimony which leads to work disruptions and strikes.
Another example of the new atmosphere which is beginning to develop at Canada Post is that a letter of understanding was signed in January 1982 with representatives of the nearly 23,000 members of the Letter Carriers' Union of Canada.
That understanding is particularly noteworthy because under a new, more streamlined bargaining process, both parties accepted their responsibilities to settle differences together, without resorting to a third party to make the tough decisions. The understanding was reached without undue delay, because both sides recognized the implications for customers and consumers of the 1980 strike. This particular set of negotiations led to the successful introduction of productivity bargaining, a system whereby people work a little harder to get more pay.
Canada Post worked with the union to identify a variety of cost savings associated with the delivery of mail. Both parties then negotiated a sharing of these savings between the union and the Corporation. The union directed its share to financing
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additional wages and benefits for its members, of course, while the Corporation directed its share to reducing the over-all cost of the settlement and helping to finance future letter delivery service improvements.
These service improvements took place, Mr. Speaker. Thousands of new homes have benefited from service where there was none before.
Productivity bargaining is a key to this and it has helped the Corporation to identify, in just this one agreement, many millions of dollars in savings that can be made over the next few years, it is therefore ironic, Mr. Speaker, that news of the best efforts of the Corporation and the Letter Carriers' Union of Canada did not reach the public. It certainly did not reach Members opposite.
Another change in the working environment which has been brought about by a creative approach to human relations is reflected in the interest employees are taking in improving service. The Corporation has already published two reports which clearly show a steady 10 per cent improvement in service for first class mail across the country over the year. Large customers have, through their own survey, confirmed this trend, as have independent businessmen. This shows that the employees at Canada Post, to use a popular phrase, are being "turned on again''. They are taking pride in their work, and we in Canada are also taking pride in their work and in our postal service. Otherwise they would not have ensured the success of the Corporation's program called "quick starts", which were designed to bring about steady service improvements.
The old structure when the post office was a department was not favourable to good human relations; neither were the internal procedures in such areas as job classification and grievances. These were frustrating and merely increased the feeling of despair among employees. When the Crown Corporation was created, the new management found that two-thirds of the huge backlog of grievances should never have left the shop floor, that is, they could have been settled by first-line supervisors and not made their way into the huge vat of stale grievances to be left to fester.
These problems are being addressed today in a whole new way. Canada Post's business plan, its first ever, lists improving human relations as a top priority. It ranks second after service, but this does not mean that it is dealt with after service has improved enough to allow management to turn its attention to it. No, both these goals along with self-sufficiency have to be addressed without faltering. Some of the rules Canada Post is using in an effort to improve the working environment are the same for any business. They boil down to dealing with people with respect, so that they, the workers, enjoy self-respect.
The Corporation is leaving behind the days when union members or leaders could think they had a right to disrupt a business for questionable goals, but it is also leaving behind practices which disregarded employees as people and treated

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them merely as bodies to shift, names on a chart or merely in statistics. The stewardship of the Corporation rests with management. It cannot shirk its responsibilities, and it does not want to do so. There is also a very important ongoing dialogue with the unions, as well as a sharing of decisions with labour. This is why Canada Post Corporation has two labour leaders on its board of directors. They share in the decisionmaking and they serve to communicate to management what motivates the unionized work force.
These board members can pass on to membership in the unions the message that real job security can only come from a thriving competitive business. No business can be competitive, let alone efficient, if its life is constantly interrupted by work disruptions or by strikes. There is no job security no matter what iron-clad contracts exist if the business, that is the employer, goes under.
In conclusion, Canada Post's first business plan was prepared in consultation with all the unions. They are all aware of the Corporation's priorities. The participation of unions on the board of directors does not ensure lethargy on the part of the unions. Of course it does not, but some people tend to confuse good labour relations and the absence of strike with complete sweetness and light. This is not the case. The reality is quite different. It must be remembered that unions are political organizations as well, and that they must often be perceived by their membership as being in conflict with management to ensure their survival, in some instances. Therefore, successful bargaining is a skill. It is not something a person is born with; however, it can be learned and improved.
The real essence of the exercise is practising the art of the possible, and this is what the management of Canada Post has been doing with success, as we can see from the resulting low work stoppage figures for 1982.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Arnold John Malone: Mr. Speaker, thank you for looking to that side of the House when you recognized me. We intend to be there soon.


Some Hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Arnold John Malone: I will not dwell too long on the comments of the Hon. Member for Welland (Mr. Parent). He told us that there was a dramatic improvement in shifting from the post office department to the Crown Corporation. If that is the case, it is the same as the situation where a person trades in his or her car for an Edsel. I submit that the improvement is not there, and I will give some facts to back it up. Also the Hon. Member for Welland gave a great litany of all the wonderful things happening in Canada Post. I challenge him to insert his speech in his householder to his constituency. If he is of the view that there is a great revelation, a turnaround, and that everyone is happy, I would tell him there is one person, John Bulloch, President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, to convince. He surveyed thousands of small-business people and discovered that 64 per cent thought there was no improvement with the new Crown Corporation, 34 per cent
thought that the situation was worse, and 2 per cent thought it was better.
In early 1980 a person in Canada said, "Here come the eighties; welcome to Canada". I would like to tell the House about Canada. It is the land where the stamps lick the people rather than the other way around. We are into a situation where our mail delivery is so undependable and inconsistent- and I emphasize the word "inconsistent"-in terms of regularity of service that it simply means in some cases a cost to business at the gain of Canada Post. If this Crown Corporation were running the pony express, it would probably issue riders with sawhorses on the basis that they were efficient and that mail delivery would be as fast as it is at present.
I accept the challenge of the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs (Mr. Ouellet) this afternoon. He said that we should recognize the challenge facing Canada Post. He and others in the Government should recognize the challenge facing the Canadian business community. Approximately 30 years ago delegations from other nations came to Canada to study our postal system. They are not coming any more. Interestingly enough, by contrast, in Switzerland today any letter mailed at night is in the addressee's mailbox the next morning. People will ask, how crazy can we be to use such a comparison, recognizing that Switzerland is a small country. Anyone who knows the mountain terrain and the separation of communities in that country knows that despite its smallness, the delivery of mail up and down the mountainside is every bit as difficult if not more so than in Canada. Yet Switzerland has dependable and assured overnight delivery.
There is a six and five slogan in the country. This program applies to Canada Post as well-six days for delivery of first-class mail, on the average, and five days if one is lucky. We simply do not have an adequate, dependable system. Let us look at a number of examples. One I should like to put forward is that of a Rotary Club in my constituency which passed a motion that it should send out a little reminder notice the day before its meeting indicating that the meeting will be the next day and the name of the guest speaker. The Rotary meetings were held at noon on Tuesdays. Therefore, they wanted to depend on receiving a notice on Monday that would remind them of their Tuesday meeting. When these notices were mailed on Monday, of course they did not arrive on time. That is acceptable. They decided to back up to Friday. Again, they found that on many occasions the message did not arrive until after the meeting. Therefore they backed up once again to Thursday, only to discover that there were cases of notices not being received until the meeting was over. They decided to back up one more day, to Wednesday, but sure enough, on a regular basis there were cases of some people getting the notice the next day, on Thursday. In other words, what good is a notice on Thursday for a meeting to be held the next Tuesday?
I have given this example to explain one of the problems in the post office. Sometimes you receive brilliant service and at
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other times you do not. There is no consistency in Canada Post.
Canada Post must take into consideration the fact that the success of many businesses depends upon the predictability of delivery. The situation as it concerns newspapers in the country is appalling. I had occasion to visit one of my constituents. He had a bundle of Edmonton journals on his table, and I asked him why he did not receive the newspapers. He proceeded to give me a speech about Canada Post. He said that he had not received one newspaper for a whole week and then received six newspapers in one day. What can any household do with a bundle of old newspapers after the $75 a year subscription has been paid? 1 suggest you would have an information overload if you were to attempt to read those newspapers.
The post office cannot simply make excuses for delays such as this. The fact of the matter is that the service is inadequate. That example gives us an idea of what is happening with daily newspaper delivery. This happens regularly in rural areas where subscribers do not receive papers for several days and then receive a flood of them on one day.
The same situation is true of the delivery of weekly newspapers in this country. It may take as long as ten days for a weekly paper to be delivered through the postal system. Of course this means that the newspaper is of no value as far as its announcements for the coming weekend are concerned. People in rural communities want to know when the next bingo is, and they expect to receive that information in the newspaper for which they have paid a subscription. This delay means the newspaper will only be delivered after the events have taken place.
I challenge any Member to dispute the fact that there are many publishers and editors of weekly newspapers who are complaining that they are losing subscriptions from those people who have moved away from their rural community but want to keep in contact with their home town because their papers are arriving 14 days after being mailed. That is the situation which exists with weekly newspapers being sent through our mailing system.
1 would like to talk about the costs being incurred as a result of the late deliveries in the postal system. Again, I will single out publishers. There are 22 weekly newspapers in my riding. The publishers of those newspapers are saying that they are losing advertising dollars because the advertisements arrive for printing only after the paper has been published. I am sure Hon. Members can appreciate that some of those advertisements are time-sensitive. The initial result of this delay is a loss to the advertiser. As well, there is the loss of revenue to the newspaper because it does not receive the advertising dollars, and finally there is the loss of opportunity to the person who may have wanted to take advantage of the goods and services being advertised. But what about the post office? Canada Post gets paid for its postage stamp for the mailing even though the service to the customer was nil. It gets its money while the rest in the chain end up paying. That is unacceptable.
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Newspapers in the community of Provost, Alberta, leave at 4.30 p.m. for delivery in Edmonton. They arrive by bus in Edmonton at midnight on the same night. Interestingly enough, it takes approximately five days from then for delivery to homes in Edmonton to the former residents of the community of Provost. The publisher complains to the Edmonton Post Office and the answer he receives is that this is normal service. That is not acceptable service, normal or otherwise.
If we examine the whole question of what is happening in rural Canada, I submit that rural Canada is rapidly coming to the conclusion that it will no longer tolerate the condition of having to negotiate sales of $100,000 combines over party line telephones while our neighbours in the cities can have private lines for the same price. We will no longer tolerate the fact that people in the cities have cable television while television programs are beamed into the rural villages that deal only with issues in those small towns and villages, and the farmers receive the same inadequate service. Rural Canadians will no longer tolerate the fact that there is door-to-door free postal delivery in the cores of our major cities while farmers have the privilege of renting a mailbox for $12 a year so that they might have the services of Canada Post. Discrimination between rural and urban communities is unacceptable in this country on national services such as television, communications and the post office.
Even in some of our smaller communities it takes as much as 10 or 11 days for the circulation of mail. I have examples of this as well. There is no other description for the Calgary central Post Office located in my Alberta constituency but that it is outlandishly horrible. The Edmonton Post Office ranks slightly above that. I can quote one newspaper editor who recently said to me, "I can no longer rely on postal service for time-related messages." He sent for a sign in Calgary. After waiting for one month he phoned to find out where his sign was. The company manager told him that they did not have an order for a sign. Therefore, he stayed on long distance telephone and ordered his sign that way. This shows that the post office still gets paid for its stamp when the service is inadequate while that individual has to pay more and suffer the delay as well. Again, this is unacceptable.
We now have a situation where the post office tells us that we have to bag our own mail for weekly newspapers. That is not necessarily a bad idea, and most of the publishers are not opposed to it. The exception is that they even have to bag one newspaper that is to be delivered to a single subscriber in another community. The offices of these weekly newspapers are cluttered with mailbags, a situation which legitimately makes them angry. To add to this frustration, they find when, they carry these bags to the post office, that they are faced with the audacity of the postmaster saying, "We like this bag in that corner and this bag in that corner." These private entrepreneurs are in the post office doing postal work. I submit that this is an absolutely intolerable situation. There is something vitally wrong if this Crown Corporation, with the subsidies which it receives, is still calling upon people to do its work while making a profit on its unacceptable service.

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I have just touched on something that I would like to express with an example. 1 said that they are making a profit on their unacceptable service, and here is the example. On October 21 of this year, a professor at Camrose College, in Camrose, Alberta, wanted a book. He ordered the book from Toronto, a great and lovely city here in central Canada. The book did not come. So, as recently as November 18, a few days ago, he phoned Toronto long distance from central Alberta, wanting to know where the book was. He was told by the company that it did not know where it was. He was told that it was shipped the same day as they received his order. He said, "I must have the book". The company said, "We will send you another one by first class special delivery". Yesterday he got both books. The agreement is that he will send one of the books back.
Let us consider what has happened in that situation. There should have been a deal whereby he sent the book back and paid the postage, or else the company sent the book and paid the postage and the post office received its money. What did happen was that the post office got its money, plus it got paid when it sent the book by special delivery, first class, at a higher price, and then it got paid again when the book was returned, plus the customer had to pay the cost of the long distance telephone call. So there has been damage to the publisher and to the person who has had to pay the postage more than three times. What happened to the post office as a result of its poor service? It got paid more than triple the amount it should have been paid, and 1 say to Hon. Members that that is absolutely unacceptable service.


Stan Darling: That is nice work, if you can get it.


Arnold John Malone: All I say is that if the Canada Post Corporation ran the nation's maternity wards, then we, too, would soon be having every other day delivery.
We have the notion that this group dealing with the business community will give us some kind of service. In fact, the post office makes a profit on its poor service, while costing more and more and causing losses to people in small businesses through time-related problems. An example is a company in my constituency which receives very lovely printed wedding invitations. It is a local printing company which does its own printing, but they get high quality ones from Stratford here in Ontario. The fact is that once it used to tell couples planning to marry that they would have their invitations within two weeks. However, now it takes anywhere from three to four weeks, and occasionally longer. Young couples are getting very nervous when their wedding invitations are not arriving on time for their planned wedding date. Out of panic, they are saying to the local company, "Print us up some wedding invitations". About the time they come off the press, here come the nice ones out of the nice Ontario printing plants. Now they have two sets of weddding invitations. The post office is not out of any money, but the people in communities are certainly out of money because someone has to pay for an extra set of printed invitations, and people will not get married twice, nor does anyone give old wedding invitations to another
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couple and say, "Here, use my wedding invitations for your wedding". The post office says, "We wash our hands of all of that. We have been paid our money." Sometimes they get paid twice, but the people get poor service. What other company in the country can get double pay on the basis of poor service? I simply say that this is a pack of nonsense.
There is another situation I would like to consider with respect to cost. Some people try to give us the impression that the increased cost of a postage stamp does not hurt very many people that much. A small college in my constituency, Camrose College, has only 600 students, but because it is a private college, it totally depends on donations for its operating budget. This is what it mails out in a year. Two times a year it has mail-outs to 600 students; six times a year it has mail-outs to 6,000 alumni; four times a year it has mail-outs to 2,000 parents; two times a year it has mail-outs to 2,000 corporations; and one time a year it has mail-outs to 2,000 foundations. When the postal rate went up from 17 cents to 30 cents it meant an increase from about $5,500 to $11,000 in just the postal budget of that college. This small college took almost a 45 per cent increase in costs just to get money in order to run its institution. The costs involved in such a situation are obviously prohibitive when we have no service such as that in the United States. I refer to the bulk mail service. Surely, institutions such as that, especially charitable organizations, should be able to profit from bulk mail rates, those which have such a large amount of mail to send out.
In another community called Hanna, there is a newspaper called the Hanna Herald. On a Wednesday the mail would go to communities about 40 miles away. Only a couple of years ago, they would get it the next day, on a Thursday. Finally, it ended up that those people did not get it on a Thursday any longer but, rather, on a Friday. 1 checked with the editor this morning and found out they are now getting their weekly newspaper on the following Monday. The newspaper is printed on a Wednesday but does not arrive in homes until Monday of the following week, even though it must be delivered a distance of only 40 miles. 1 say to any people connected with the post office that that is a speed of less than eight miles per day. Mr. Speaker, I can walk eight miles an hour. In other words, I could deliver that newspaper in four hours. However, the post office takes five days to go 40 miles.
1 see, Mr. Speaker, that you are giving me the signal that my time is up. 1 want Your Honour to know that it is my time that has expired, not the issues about the post office, and that I will mail those to you, Sir. If they are not in Hansard tomorrow, we can presume that it is the post office again that is so inefficient that you have not got them.


Some Hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mrs. Ursula Appolloni (York South-Weston):: Mr. Speaker,
I am absolutely overwhelmed by some of the remarks of the Hon. Member for Crowfoot (Mr. Malone). He tells us he is capable of walking eight miles an hour. My goodness! Our speedy colleague from Crowfoot! Before I came into the House
November 23, 1982

this evening, I was with another of my colleagues. I was honoured by an invitation to a reception held by His Excellency the American Ambassador. I mention this not only because it was pleasant, but because it was also informative and brought home to me, from the various topics that we discussed, one of the fundamental differences between Americans and Canadians. I envy Americans because they have an absolute gift for being able to be positive about themselves and even show pride in their institutions, however, fallible those institutions may be. Canadians, on the other hand, have an absolute penchant for negativism and absolutely destructive selfcriticism. We have a reluctance to acknowledge improvements, and yet there have been vast improvements in postal service in Canada. We have an honest, congenital inability to feel pride in any of our institutions.
Let us compare the difference between American and Canadian approaches to the post office system. When I came back from that reception I did a little research in the Library and found out that the American post office system also has its problems. It has had a tremendous amount of labour problems and a growing deficit for years and years. Congress is constantly faced with the problem of how to tackle the deficit. But do the Americans sit and gripe constantly about their mail service? No, they do not. Obviously they have some legitimate complaints, which they voice through the proper channels.
Now, although the post office department did not have an official motto, it put an inscription over several of its buildings throughout the United States. It became so well known that many people felt it was the motto of the mail carriers. It says:
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
This quotation comes from the Greek historian, Herodotus.
How do we treat our mail carriers? Certainly we do not write any poetry on our mail buildings and, frankly, I believe that most of us even forget to thank our mail carriers when they do their jobs extremely well indeed.
The Hon. Member across the way, the Hon. Member for Crowfoot, mentioned that sometimes the postal service is splendid or brilliant. I wonder if he has taken the trouble to tell the officials that it was splendid or even brilliant. We are so very anxious to criticize.
In my life 1 have managed to spend several years living in four different countries. Perhaps that gives me a very different perspective on many things from that of my other colleagues in the House. 1 can tell you, from my experience in four countries, that the Canadian postal service is by far superior to any of the other three.


An Hon. Member:: Even in England?


Ursula Appolloni: Even that. 1 would like to take this opportunity, if I may, to place on the record my own personal appreciation of the present officials of Canada Post for the courtesy and tremendous efficiency with which they deal with complaints or inquiries. On occasion I have voiced a complaint
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on the part of my constituent, and the post office itself sent investigators right to the scene. I do not think you can quarrel with that kind of service. I think it behooves all of us to admit that there are a lot of good things going on right now in the postal service. Certainly it can be improved, and 1 think it will be.
If I can continue now to speak about the post office of the future, let me say that when Canada Post became a Crown corporation on October 16 of last year, it began an important job that will affect all Canadians: to improve the efficiency of the post office and to make it behave as a business, with a corresponding emphasis on cost-cutting and efficiency. That is a tall order and it cannot be completed overnight. Years of deterioration and unrealistic procedures have left a legacy of disappointment and unpredictability. But the job of remaking this national processing and distribution giant into a responsive and worth-while organization has already begun. And Canada Post Corporation is now attacking a host of problems with enthusiasm and commitment, and for that I believe we should all applaud them.
One of the distinct differences between the status of Canada Post as a Crown corporation and its previous role as a Department of Government is its business orientation. Canada Post is the twentieth largest business in the country, but to survive and grow it must be increasingly relevant to the communications and goods movement industries. That means planning for the future as well as the present, and it is one of the objectives of the Corporation that were set out in the Canada Post Corporation Act.
The Corporation has established a business development division that will give it the entrepreneurial drive that it needs to maintain that commitment. One of the projects this division is investigating relates to the more than 8,000 branch offices, more than all of the chartered banks combined. The Corporation has post offices in more than 2,000 communities where there are no banks. But the breadth of transactions taking place in those offices is not large enough in relation to their capital costs. Canada Post could well provide any number of services that would benefit from a widespread retail network- perhaps an indirect banking role for the chartered banks on a "fee for service" basis. It could also have a part to play in the catalogue sales business, or in travel or maybe insurance.
The Corporation has a service called Priority Post that is the fastest-growing courier business in the country. Recently Canada Post announced substantial improvements to this operation that will give it even more flexibility and responsiveness. These changes will offer Canadians a new capability that is specially tailored to the changing marketplace.
Canada Post's two electronic mail services, Intelpost and Telepost, currently move about a million and a half messages a year. But the Corporation is looking much further ahead to position itself aggressively in this growing business. Other countries are experimenting with electronic mail, and Canada Post wants to work with them to open vast new possibilities for its customers to communicate electronically both here and

November 23, 1982
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abroad. The Corporation wants to build on an already useful service, to make it that much better and that much more accessible to its customers.
Carving out a segment of the high technology business is one of Canada Post's strategies for achieving higher productivity in the future. Canada has a tremendous economic potential, partly as a result of our natural resources. Our proximity to the large and potentially lucrative U.S. market can also be used to advantage. The Corporation is determined to work harder and smarter to make these potential assets bankable.
New technology also provides a challenge and a solution to the productivity struggle. Doing things smarter also means taking advantage of new technological advancements which are increasing all the time. And this need not mean a threat to job security. It simply means that Canada Post can replace low-productivity jobs with more rewarding and productive ones.
I believe that Canadian managers, including those at Canada Post Corporation, must learn to use new technology much more competitively. And though our traditional expenditures on research and development have been low, that situation appears to be improving.
We have to increase public awareness of the value of technology as a competitive weapon. Canada Post marketing and production people are already pointing the way. Employees in general have also learned that they have a stake in technological change. Doing things smarter through better use of new technology can bring more meaningful and more rewarding jobs. People understand what such programs can mean to their quality of life as well as to productivity.
It has taken some time for some employees to relate to Canada Post's new structure and business emphasis, but most of them have now begun to feel a personal sense of pride and achievement in the operation. They have started to make their own decisions and to realize that they will rise or fall on their own judgment and on their own initiative.
They realize that survival as a business is not just a day-today concern, that the post office must look to the future, and that they are an indispensible part of that future. It may be difficult to envisage today, but Canada Post can become a leader in communications in the 1990s providing customers with a combination of some traditional services and some very new ones. It has that potential.
The future of the business will not be decided in Ottawa in isolation. It will take continuing dialogue between Canada Post's employees and management, the unions, the customers and the shareholder, which is the Government of Canada. This dialogue must be backed up by a commitment to strive for excellence.
Canada Post Corporation has made a good start, and I believe that it will sustain it through the post office of the future. Meanwhile let us remember that we have a lot of good things now in Canada Post. I, for one, am grateful for them.


Mr. Nelson A. Riis (Kamioops-Shuswap):: Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have this opportunity to speak regarding
the Canadian postal system and to be able to communicate to the Minister a number of concerns that have been brought to my attention over the last number of weeks.
I think it is fair to say as a Member of Parliament that if you were to walk along the main streets of any small village, town, urban area or rural area of Canada and ask people what was on their mind about the federal Government, what kind of a message they would like one to take back to Ottawa, you can be assured that the topic of the post office would come up sometime during that discussion. People will recall that for many years the service provided by the Canadian postal service was nothing less than first class. Canadians were proud of the postal system. As a number of speakers have indicated, Canada was often held up as the model for postal systems which other countries could initiate. They came to Canada looking for guidance.
Unfortunately, that has changed somewhat over the years, unquestionably for the worst. It is interesting to identify some of the reasons why that has taken place. I will come to that eventually.
I want first to look at the mandate of the Corporation and identify two or three areas of that mandate which deserve some comment tonight. One of the areas taken on by the Crown Corporation was to improve postal service in Canada. There are a number of areas where it has done just that. Recently we have seen a new postal code for sending letters to Santa Claus. For the first time one can identify that in our postal history as a major step forward.
Seriously, the delivery time of the postal corporation has increased for first class mail. Over the last number of months it has improved from 80 per cent to 89 per cent in terms of meeting on-time targets. There has been an expansion in some of the urban areas of Canada. Some of the newly emerging landscapes of Canada now receive door-to-door mail service as they find themselves contiguous to existing urban areas. Service is being applied to those areas that certainly ought to qualify.
People still criticize the line-ups in the post office. They are concerned about the level of service. Those people might recall visiting one of the most sacred corporations in this country which is often held up as the best example of corporate efficiency, namely, the Canadian banking system. Notice the long line-ups forming there as you patiently wait to get to a teller or wait at the counter to be served. Before criticizing the services given today by employees in the postal service, let us look at it in comparison with other services being provided.
When looking at the reduced services being experienced in the Canadian postal service over the last number of years, there is one group we ought not to blame. That group is the workers who carry the mail, provide the essential services at the counter and run the thousands of small postal operations across the country.
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These people are dedicated to their task. I see them time after time throughout all seasons bring the mail to my door in a courteous and serious way. When I visit the small post offices in the rural parts of my constituency, I see dedicated workers. They provide a very positive and useful service to those small communities and rural areas.
Look at the services provided by the people who deliver along the routes in rural Canada. They do more than simply deliver the mail. Their contribution is quite outstanding, particularly in the season we are now approaching.
When we talk about the reduced or decreased services of our postal system, it is important to identify the true cause of that reduction in service. Like any other organization, it has to come from the top. The reason for the difficulties today is that the management of the postal system leaves a great deal to be desired, including both the Conservatives and Liberals which provided the general mandate and down through the senior levels of the post office. Therein lies the critical problems which face us. 1 will have more to say on that in a moment.
1 now want to deal with the human relations that make up another mandate in the postal Corporation. When you look at the record, you find that time lost due to industrial disputes has decreased over the last number of weeks and months. The reason for that is that the whole process of free collective bargaining has been removed from the postal system. As a result of the imposition of the six and five program by the Liberals and Conservatives, free collective bargaining, which is certainly the very basis of labour-management relations in a free country, has been removed from those who work in the postal system. On looking at the whole realm of improved human relations in the postal system, one realizes that a great deal of improvement is possible there. Hopefully, we will see improvements in this area over the next couple of months.
I want to concentrate tonight on the self-sufficiency aspect of the mandate. This is the component which the Liberals and Conservatives feel very strongly about, that the postal system in Canada should break even. In fact, some speakers from the Progressive Conservative Party have indicated that it should make a profit. I wonder whether those same persons feel that the armed services, universities, elementary schools and hospitals in Canada should also make a profit.
There is a certain amount of hypocrisy when individuals in this House demonstrate that they are able to talk out of both sides of their mouth at exactly the same time, on one hand saying that the postal system should make a profit or break even and on the other hand that it should improve the level of service. This blind acceptance by the Government and the Progressive Conservatives that the deficit must be reduced at all costs has resulted in some of the following problems in the postal system of Canada.
Let us look at the increased rates that we have experienced. In 1968 the cost of a first class postage stamp went up to 6 cents, in 1971 to 7 cents, in 1972 to 8 cents, in 1976 to 10 cents, in 1977 to 12 cents, in 1978 to 14 cents, in 1979 to 17 cents, in 1982 to 30 cents, and soon it will go up to 32 cents.
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If we look at the increases we find that since the postal service was turned into a Crown corporation, the number of letters mailed increased by 88.2 per cent. If we look at the period since the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) came to power in 1968, we see an increase of 540 per cent. During a time of restraint, an increase of 88 per cent in a two-year period is something we should question, especially when we consider the impact this has on certain groups in society. I refer in particular to our senior citizens. Most of the mail I receive about the cost of postage originates with this group. These people look forward to writing letters and sending parcels to their family and kin across this vast country. They count on the mail. At 32 cents a letter, that will create a very serious hardship for many senior citizens in this country, particularly when we consider that most senior citizens live below the poverty level.
We will also want to recognize that in the attempt to reduce the deficit of the postal service, certain merchants have been subsidized. Bulk mail, which has often been referred to as "junk mail", is subsidized by those people paying 32 cents a letter. In other words, we are saying to the senior citizens of our country, or to the rank and file citizenship across Canada, that we want to increase the cost of their letters in order to enable bulk mail to be delivered at lower rates. Somehow that situation has to be recognized and certainly criticized, that once again the taxpayers of Canada, the rank and file citizens of Canada, are being asked to subsidize the corporate operations of the country.
We have heard a great deal about Saturday closing of wickets in the rural areas of Canada. I suspect that for most Canadians who live in urban centres that does not cause much concern. There is little sensitivity, I suspect, among the people making those decisions, of what it is like to live in small communities or in the rural parts of this country. In my own constituency of Kamloops-Shuswap, for the cattlemen, farmers, miners, loggers or tradesmen who are forced to work out of town, Saturday is often really the only day when they are able to get to the wicket to do their postal business. Saturday, closure, Mr. Speaker, is problematical for these people, indeed.
Also we see the closure of the small rural post office when the single operator is ill. Again, this is a reduction in service. We see the discontinuance of Saturday delivery in the rural areas of Canada. We see that if a carrier is ill no service is going to be provided for that area, and if that carrier who is ill has a business route, someone from a residential route will be taken off, and not replaced, in order to enable that business mail to be delivered. Again this is an obvious reduction in service for Canadians.
We also note that consideration is now being given to alternating daily delivery service. That service will not continue on a Monday through Friday basis in Canada but will likely find itself moving to mail delivery on alternate days only. We hear a great deal about the threat of cutting 1,500 jobs from the postal system. We hear that consideration is being given now to eliminating carrier service to new communities, asking

November 23, 1982
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people to rely on the boxes at the end of the street. We notice that since the six and five program has come in, the rates for mail boxes have gone up substantially more than 6 per cent and 5 per cent, Mr. Speaker. This betrays the true commitment to the six and five program by the Government, resulting in increased costs, and in many cases reduced service to Canadians as a result of its commitment to reduce this deficit.
1 think if the situation is described accurately, Mr. Speaker, we will find that the postal system is being curtailed in an effort to reduce the deficit to zero by 1985. When we consider the difference in service that rural Canadians face in terms of their cable television, power lines, availability of fuels, telephone service, radio service, or most recently the cutbacks in VIA Rail service, we realize that we must guard against any further cutbacks, particularly now as the Government attempts to rationalize the postal Corporation.
Back in October, 1980 we listened very carefully when the Minister responsible for postal services in Canada promised Canadians from the floor of the House of Commons that the Government would ensure that existing levels of service would be maintained. That is not taking place today. We are seeing services curtailed in a full variety of areas. What I would ask the Minister responsible to consider this evening is whether we should not attempt to phase this deficit reduction attempt over a longer period of time. Our rush to make the Crown Corporation a break-even operation, or preferably, as someone said, a make-money operation, results in reduction in services, which is something that Canadians ought not to accept. In a country as vast as Canada where the effort to overcome distance and to increase communication between people ought to be receiving much greater attention from Members of this House, exactly the opposite is taking place. We are making it more difficult for Canadians to communicate and to overcome the distances of our vast country.
In closing, Mr. Speaker, I would ask that the Government give some attention, in this commitment to have the deficit reduced, to maintaining the level of potential service that Canadians once knew and would certainly like to see once again.


Mr. Ralph Ferguson (Lambton-Middlesex):: Mr. Speaker, just for a few brief moments tonight I would like to make some comments on the Canada Post Corporation which came into effect October 16, 1982, following debate and agreement in the House of Commons, supported by all three parties of the House. I believe that, by and large, we have a very dedicated group of people in Canada Post. I am speaking of the people in the local post offices and the rural mail carriers, and those carriers who do the letter walks in the community in all kinds of weather. 1 believe there has been a tremendous improvement in some sectors over the years, but as Canada grew, there were changes which developed, and the system was not able to keep pace with changes, not only in our society and in our business within Canada, but changes in automation, in methods of handling mail, in transportation within Canada.
I believe there are areas where we can cut the costs and improve the service. If we reflect back a few years, perhaps
some of the deterioration of the present service came at the same time that the mail cars in which we used to sort the mail between cities and towns, were removed from the trains. I believe this is why some of the problems started. If we look at the volume of mail delivered each day between Toronto and Montreal; for example, this mail is loaded on vans, taken to the railway station, loaded on the trains, up to six carloads at a time. You can imagine the number of letters that are there to sort. You have six carloads of mail arriving at the destination at once in these huge postal terminals.
In spite of the automation we have in place, I believe perhaps the time has come to look back to that old system where the mail was loaded in mail cars and the employees sorted the mail between cities so that it arrived at its destination ready to go out to the district offices. Those employees knew when they left that a certain volume of work had to be completed. It was a good system. There were many instances of letters mailed in Toronto in the evening and delivered in Montreal the next morning. As it is now, particularly for some of the smaller communities, the post office trailers are held up longer than they should be, waiting for their load to arrive, waiting to be filled, and consequently we are faced with delay.
At the time the railway service was discontinued we built the huge postal terminals, and perhaps this is when the service started to deteriorate. Not because of the workers or automation but because of the sheer volume which had to be handled out of those areas of concentration. Now in areas such as the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, where we have a large number of passenger trains such as the LRCs, the working conditions on those trains are much better than in years past.
Another area I want to touch on very briefly, Mr. Speaker, is that of small towns and villages, and our rural mail delivery.
I believe the Hon. Member for Kamloops-Shuswap (Mr. Riis) touched on that matter briefly when he pointed out how important the mail service was to farmers and small-businessmen who come into the small communities on Saturdays to do their business. Although we are trying to cut costs and we have reverted to the five-day per week delivery in many areas of Canada, I would like to suggest that perhaps we should look at this again. We have very little business conducted in the business community on either Saturday or Sunday. As a result, the mail load on Monday is very light. Therefore, I would suggest we examine the feasibility of reinstating Saturday mail delivery in the rural areas and discontinuing the Monday delivery. Not only is there a lighter load of mail on Mondays as it is on the week's news which is carried in the Saturday papers. Most rural mail carriers deliver Saturday's paper which provides the weekend reading for families, and it is sorely missed in communities across Canada.
I believe if we were to re-examine this situation from the standpoint of discontinuing delivery on Monday rather than on Saturday, it would be a very positive step. The cost-cutting concept is accepted, but it is unfortunate that we did not do
November 23, 1982

more research into that particular sector before we made the decision.
1 would also like to comment on the determination of rural mail carriers who go out in all types of weather conditions in their dedication to serving the people along their routes. Many of them have a second source of income because quite often the contracts for those rural mail routes do not provide them with an adequate living. Consequently we find many older people delivering mail in rural areas, and while I do not want to see them deprived of a long weekend, most of them do finish their routes by approximately 10.30 in the morning, or at noon at the latest. So, Mr. Speaker, I believe that if we could look at these two areas, it would be a very positive step which would be welcomed by a majority of the people of Canada.


Mr. Gordon Gilchrist (Scarborough East):: Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be able to join in this debate tonight on the important matter of good postal service. I am pleased the Minister has seen fit to withdraw the definition of a letter, even if that may only be temporary. 1 hope it will not. 1 do not want to re-state many of the well presented arguments by my colleagues and others on such things as cutbacks in service or the many examples of poor postal service, but I would like to refer to the Minister's mid-1982 letter in which he declared that the new regulations provide clarification of our social responsibility to ensure that all Canadians have access to a basic level of postal service at a standard cost. 1 want to deal with these two points, particularly the basic level.
Historically, Mr. Speaker, the basic level of postal service has included the ability of one person to transmit a simple message to another elsewhere in Canada, or in the world for that matter, in time frames consistent with the technology of the day. As technology advanced, packet ships were replaced by coal steamers and stage coaches were replaced by trains. Later those trains and ships were replaced by planes for long distance transportation, and trucks for short-haul. Delivery time frames shrank but costs remained low as volume increased. But always the transmitted article was the same, a simple message, personal, and secure, if desired, in an envelope. Although the speed of mail increased, it was for average or regular mail, and few reasonable people would disagree with that. However, for items requiring extraordinary consideration because of speed or shape, fragility or bulk, or for any other reason, other methods had to be devised. Wherever such special considerations entered into the mail service, trouble followed. It was because of special considerations that special delivery was devised where people could pay extra for extra service.
Couriers, of course, came into being to provide faster, specialized delivery for parcels and letters. It was because of the special considerations of bulk, size, weight or speed that the instrusion of these considerations became a cause of postal decline. Although postal codes and highspeed letter processing machines were designed and installed, volume and special requirements continued to break down the system. The efforts
Supply
of the post office to handle and improve the system were laudable. No doubt Canada Post will continue to work on solutions to provide a basic level of postal service at standard cost.
While it worked on special techniques in the past, this at no time precluded the provision of such special services by private, competing companies which could do the job better. These companies bought high-speed planes, special delivery vehicles, special wire services and now, even satellite and optical message transmission services.
Not many years ago when the post office was approached by Canadian banks to develop a high-speed means of handling interbank transactions so that bank customers could be given much better banking services, consistent with the modern age, the post office declined to provide such service and the banks had to proceed on their own.
Now that EFT, electronic funds transfer, and other highspeed banking services have become established techniques, the Government wishes to pirate this private and efficient system. It wants to attempt to superimpose it or fit it into the basic level of postal service, with the obvious consequence of reducing efficiency and further complicating an already overloaded and inefficient system where specialty services are concerned. A bank transaction is not a letter, be it 500 grams or not. A bank withdrawal made in Calgary from an account in Vancouver is not a letter, even if a paper printout is made. Similarly, a recapitulation of all the day's transactions, when processed electronically, is not a letter or a number of letters.
Would Canada Post plan to charge 30 cents per line for the number of transactions in a day? If so, we can think of what such costs would add to bank charges.
If the monopoly enjoyed by Canada Post is to be used to pirate this service, reduce its efficiency and raise its cost, then clearly such monopoly must be opposed. The continuing preoccupation of the Government with state, bureaucratic, noncompetitive services will surely retard the development of modern communication services compared to those of other countries.
The dictionary defines a letter as a "written or printed message addressed to a person or persons, usually sent by post or messenger and fairly long". But then, any reasonable person knows what a letter is. What is the new definition of a letter which the Minister is promoting? It states that it is "mailable matter in any form, the mass of which, if any ... ". Clearly, a letter is no longer a letter. The world can call a letter a letter, but Canada Post and the Government know better. They can ignore reality and extend bureaucratic monopoly to the homes and offices of the nation.
What is this "massless" communication, and when will it come into being? It is here now, Mr. Speaker, It is not a thing of the future. It is simply the sending of a message from one point to another without it ever having been transcribed on solid material. In other words, it was entirely energy from start to finish-not mass or substance.

November 23, 1982
Supply
An example of such communication would be sending a message by computer, through electrical or optical means, to a receiving computer which would not print it out on paper but would, rather, display it on a CRT, a television screen.
What jurisdiction or control should Canada Post, which the Minister says is mandated to provide a basic level of postal service, have over such privately sent, privately funded, privately designed and never "posted" communications?
The exclusive privilege granted Canada Post was intended to allow it to provide basic services for simple "letters" so that private business would not skim off the lucrative trade between such cities as Toronto and Montreal while leaving costly, small rural communities unserviced.
The definition of a letter-which has been withdrawn- described it as "mailable matter in any form, the mass of which, if any . . . whether or not enclosed in an envelope. .." leaves the power-hungry Government and bureaucratically obsessed Minister with all the latitude necessary to eliminate private, confidential, speedy, modern, world-class communication in Canada.
Also, when the absolute monopoly has been established and all the competition eliminated, we will have "Communi-Can", the PetroCan of communications, where the taxpayer will pay far too much for letters, just as he now pays far too much for gasoline.
I hope that the Minister has now really taken to heart the seriousness of the myriad representations made by responsible, non-partisan, greatly involved organizations and companies such as the Retail Council of Canada, General Motors of Canada, Canadian Tire Corporation and over 300 others, which have different motives from the Government. Their motive is to reduce the cost to taxpayers, not to increase it. They have clearly outlined the unacceptability of a definition which includes "massless" excludes the privacy of envelopes, and indicates no limit to the horrendous cost of Government intervention and possible censorship.
At a time when Canada is actively promoting Telidon, the world's best videotech system which will, one day, include electronic mail to every home that has an outlet, we have one bureaucratic, antediluvian Minister erecting roadblocks in the way of another who is trying to "sell the future" and develop Canada's skills in high technology.
If we had a Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) who understood the complexities and opportunities offered by advanced thinking instead of revelling in stultified, restrictionist ideology, such retrograde legislation would never have been introduced in the first place.
Canada has been suffocated in research and advance-job creation by the neglect of creative thinkers and the elevation of its socialist dinosaurs to positions of power.
While I would encourage Canada Post to get on with its attempts to generate efficiency in the basic postal system for handling regular, everyday dictionary definition letters, I totally oppose its dabbling in areas which are far beyond its
competence, particularly when it has not yet solved the basic problems that lie within its simple mandate.
The plundering of productive businesses, large and small, to subsidize inefficiency; the use of deficit taxpayers' dollars to expand into unneeded areas of electronic communications which are already well handled; those specialized courier services, and the restriction on the freedom of a person or tradesperson to drop a note at the door of a friend or to leave an invoice at a customer's door, on penalty of a fine, are the reasons that Canada is falling back in its standard of living while other nations move ahead. That is why the people of Canada have lost faith in the backward-facing policies of this head-in-the-sand Government.
This is why I intend to support this motion of censure against the Government which has raised postal rates 500 per cent in the Prime Minister's term of office. Now that he has wrestled inflation and employment to the ground perhaps he can start on postal rates.
Canada's postal service and its employees operate at a high level of efficiency. They would do even better if a letter were defined as being perhaps 50 grams' weight enclosed in a standardized envelope.
I look forward to the day when regular mail at low cost will provide the nonspecialized service that is needed right across the country. 1 urge the Government to let Canada Post get on with its principal task of serving the nation with a basic level of postal service at a standard low cost.
[ Translation]


Mr. Deputy Speaker:: Order, please. It being 10 p.m., it is my duty to inform the House that in accordance with Standing Order 58(11), the proceedings on the motion have expired.



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

[Stage Direction]
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 40 deemed to have been moved.

Mr. Doug Anguish (The Battlefords-Meadow Lake):: Mr. Speaker, some weeks ago when the Public Accounts for Canada ending March 31, 1982 were tabled, I asked the Minister of Finance (Mr. Lalonde) about the accounting practices of the Government and its agencies.
In his certificate, the Auditor General said that he believed the "stated accounting policies are not appropriate for a fair presentation of the assets and liabilities and revenues and expenditures of the Government of Canada." He went on to
November 23, 1982

say that they were inadequate in two very specific areas. First, significant departmental activities were reported in separate financial statements or accounts that are not combined in the Government's financial statements. Separate financial statements or accounts are presented in other sections of the Public Accounts in such areas as the Exchange Fund Account, the Canada Pension Plan Account, the Unemployment Insurance Account, the Canadian Ownership Account and other similar Accounts.
Second, the Auditor General stated that investments to Crown-owned corporations and agencies as of March 31, 1982 amounted to approximately $25 billion or 63 per cent of the Government's net recorded assets. The assets, liabilities, revenues and expenditures of these entities are not consolidated in the accompanying financial statements.
This points to very real abuses or misconceptions which the Government puts forth in presenting its financial statements. I would not dare to say that the Government is trying to hide anything because in some areas it understates its assets and in other areas it actually overstates them. An example of the Government overstating its accounts could be found where there are excess amounts advanced over asset value received that confers a benefit and constitutes expenditure in respect of international development assistance, which should be recorded and reported as such on the Statement of Revenue and Expenditure.
The Auditor General also estimated that if international development assistance loans and subscriptions were reported in this manner, reported assets would decrease and accumulated deficit would increase by approximately $3.9 billion as at March 31, 1982.
A second example of where the Government is in error in overstating its assets is that financial obligations are not recorded in respect of amounts payable under statutory appropriations, earned and unpaid annual vacation leave, employee termination benefits and actuarial liabilities arising from the indexing provisions of employee pension plans. Also in the view of the Auditor General, all these financial obligations should be appropriately recorded and reported in the financial statements to provide a more complete disclosure of Government liabilities. Ele estimated that if these obligations were recorded, the reported liabilities and accumulated deficit would be increased by at least another $14.5 billion as at March 31, 1982.
An example of the Government being in error in underestimating its assets is in the area of revenue for the year from oil export charges, a federal Government tax. It excluded receipts of some $445 million which are included in the "specified purpose" liability account. Its failure to include this amount in revenue is inadequate in the opinion of the Auditor General and not in accordance with accounting policies. There should be another $445 million in revenue.
This leaves the books of the Government of Canada in a position where its actual assets are overstated by some $17.6
Adjournment Debate
billion. 1 think the Government should address itself to improving the bookkeeping practices, administrative policies and accounting principles it uses.
Right now, I think most people are aware that the private sector uses generally accepted accounting principles. Within the Government of Canada there are no generally accepted accounting principles. I would urge the Government to address this problem and rectify it so that all accounts of the Government of Canada, anywhere Canadian taxes are spent, have a standard form by which the Government accounts for that.
The second proposal which would significantly help reporting the Government's accounts fairly would be to incorporate Crown corporation legislation.
In conclusion, as it stands now, if any company or any individual submitted a tax return to the Department of National Revenue based on financial statements similar to the way the Government of Canada draws them up, they would certainly be prosecuted for income tax evasion.


Mr. Douglas Fisher (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, in rendering his opinion of the Government's 1981-82 financial statement, the Auditor General expressed four basic concerns. First, the Auditor General concluded that loans to developing countries, because of their concessionary terms, should be reported on the books of Canada at a value that discounts for the benefits conferred on the recipient. This is in fact inflation accounting which yet has to receive broad application in either the private or public sector.
It is generally acknowledged, however, that while inflation accounting would tend to reduce the value of financial assets such as developing loans, it would have an offsetting impact on financial liabilities such as outstanding debt.
The Auditor General expressed the view that financial obligations arising from statutory appropriations not now reported have the effect of understating liabilities. The exclusion of certain liabilities as well as assets resulting from the current stated accounting policies, accounting policies designed to comply with enabling legislation, is fully recognized in the notes accompanying the financial statements. The current method of accounting for the Supplementary Retirement Benefit Accounts, with which the Attorney General takes exception, results from a simple compliance with enabling legislation, legislation passed by this House.
Third, the Attorney General feels that consideration should be given to extending the definition of the Government as an accounting entity. The Comptroller General has made an undertaking before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to once again review the appropriateness of the financial statements in satisfying the needs of the users.
Finally, the Attorney General concludes that the Government has understated the budgetary revenues as a direct consequence of reporting the provincial share of the Oil Export Charge as a financial liability. The method of reporting was

November 23, 1982
Adjournment Debate
both consistent with the Government's undertaking in the October budget, the National Energy Program, the agreement reached with the Provinces and the accounting option advocated by the Auditor General himself.
On a personal note, apart from this technical answer, the Hon. Member said in his comments and question, "I may be a young Member of Parliament but I am certainly not stupid." 1 agree with that.


CANADIAN TRANSPORT COMMISSION-SEVERITY OF PENALTY IMPOSED ON AIR B.C. (B) COMMISSION'S POWERS
Donald W. Munro: Mr. Speaker, on Friday last 1 had occasion to draw the attention of the Minister of Transport (Mr. Pepin) to a letter he had received from the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce relating to a penalty which had been imposed upon Air B.C. for having offered on the first of April, 1982, a special fare to travel between Victoria and Vancouver. This special fare, by way of a prank, if you like, or a promotional operation, was considered for a number of months by the Canadian Transport Commission before it decided what it should do. 1 will leave to one side for a moment what the Minister said with regard to the stupidity of the question, because that is quite another matter.
In order to deal with this question properly I think we have to bear in mind some rules which govern the decisions of the Canadian Transport Commission. The Minister reminded me of one of them. He said that one of the rules is against predatory prices. This was not a predatory price for all time. This was a price for one occasion. However, the fundamental rule to which the Canadian Transport Commission is committed is that any regulation should be determined on the basis of "public convenience" and necessity.
I speak, with the prompting of the Victoria Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of the travelling public. An editorial this morning in the Colonist Times was brought to me by a friend who travels from Victoria. It states that the Canadian Transport Commission is "grounding people" because the penalty, which was eventually levied against Air B.C., was that on December 21 that flight of Air B.C. should be grounded. That is draconian. This decision, however, was not rendered until October 18. It took from April 1 until October to end the shillying and shallying this way and that and to decide what would be done. Then, on October 18, a penalty was levied that there would be no Rights on that particular route on December 21.
I suppose one could say that the airline did breach some regulation for one day in a lighthearted way. However, to inRict a penalty of that sort, to that extent, at that season, is quite unacceptable. The travelling public will be grounded on that particular date. Air B.C. came in to fill some gaps between Air Canada and CP Air connecting the mainland and the island. Air B.C. fills those gaps, and to eliminate that particular service so close to Christmas time when families are
coming together is a shocking approach to this particular matter, to my way of thinking.
I want to stress that I am not speaking on behalf of Air B.C. It was the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce which had written a letter to the Minister and I received a copy of it. For very obvious reasons Air B.C. must keep its head down; it must deal with the Canadian Transport Commission. I understand it has made some suggestion regarding some other days when it might be prepared to be shutdown. However, it seems to be quite beyond the merits of the case to have it shut down right in the middle of the Christmas season. There must be some other way of dealing with it. It might be appropriate for the penalty to be imposed some other time in January, after the Christmas season, for example. 1 remind Hon. Members that the governing and guiding principle of the Canadian Transport Commission is "public convenience and necessity". I ask, how the public convenience and public necessity are to be served by prohibiting these Rights on December 21 ?
I received a letter from the Minister which he must have written Friday afternoon because I received it on Monday morning. I am not disclosing anything which has not already been disclosed by the press because he did make his letter public, but he admitted with regret, and I give him honour for it, that the answer he gave me was "somewhat misleading". He said in the House he had asked the CTC to review this particular decision. In fact, he admitted in the letter, as reported in that paragraph, "I have not asked for a review because 1 am not empowered to do so on my own intiative". He could have asked, through Cabinet, that there be a Cabinet decision to rescind or alter that particular decision, but he stepped back from that because, as he said, it was to be word only in situations of national importance. It may not be nationally important in the eyes of the Minister, the matter of communications between Vancouver Island and the Mainland. It is of great importance, however, and I hope the Minister learns this one day, to those who live on the mainland or on the island, particularly at Christmastime, that those facilities of air transport be available.
I do hope that one way or another, possibly with just a little nudge by the Minister, the CTC can be a little more reasonable, a little more charitable; remembering that the Christmas spirit is there, and that it should not act like Scrooge, as it is about to by insisting on that particular penalty. Perhaps, it could be just a little more charitable at that season of the year.
I hope it will allow Air B.C. to Ry on December 21 and to take its penalty, whatever it may be, at another season.


Douglas Glenn Fisher: Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see that the Hon. Member acknowledged receipt of the explanatory letter he received from the Minister of Transport (Mr. Pepin). In that letter there is an important note, and 1 would be happy to table this letter if you require it, Mr. Speaker. I do not know the procedure here. I do not have a translation, I only have an English edition, but we would like the letter to be public.
November 23, 1982

I would point out that the Elon. Member asked the Cabinet to rescind the decision made by the CTC. But the Hon. Member failed to point out what the Minister says, namely, and 1 quote here:
-I have been chastised so much for using it that I hesitate to do so.
In fact, the Hon. Member opposite is one of those Members who has risen periodically to chastise the Minister of Transport for the decisions he has made respecting other transport modes, and now he wants us to continue a practice that he has otherwise found distasteful.
I think it is important as well, Mr. Speaker, to point out that Air B.C. knew the rules. It did not go blindly into a situation. People in this industry are respected professionals. They understand that they operate in heavily regulated circumstances. Air B.C. chose to ignore the regulations. Not only did Air B.C. ignore the regulations in the first instance it also ignored its opportunity to appeal the penalty. Should we turn to a process that has been scorned by the Opposition in order to give relief to an airline that does not itself obey the rules or use the proper methods of appeal.


Donald W. Munro: That was explained fully.


Douglas Glenn Fisher: To what extent does the Hon. Member want us to run that airline's business, I wonder.


THE ECONOMY-GOVERNMENT POLICY SPENDING AFFECTING PRIVATE SECTOR. (B) INTEREST RATE LEVELS
Mr. Don Blenkarn (Mississauga South):: Mr. Speaker, on October 27 I had occasion to ask the Minister of Finance (Mr. Lalonde) questions with respect to the principles on which the financial affairs of the country are being managed. You will recall, Mr. Speaker, in the Minister's address to this House the Minister stated that as one of the basic principles of economic management we must continue to rely primarily on the dynamism and the creativity of the private sector as engines of growth in Canada. He went on to say that the Government will be seeking areas where it can act in close co-operation with business and labour to improve the financial help of the private sector as well as its ability to expand and prosper.
1 asked the Minister really what had he done for the private sector. I pointed out to the Minister that the effect of his Budget was to put $400 million into Canadair and de Havi-land, both losers as far as profitability is concerned, and both Crown corporations. I pointed out to the Minister that within a day or so after the Budget we learned that Petro Canada had purchased certain gas stations owned by British Petroleum at a cost in excess of $600 million. I pointed out that in the budget the Minister increased unemployment insurance premiums by $1.7 billion. That is a further tax on employment. It increases the wage wedge to $5.52 per $100 for wages paid.
The Minister replied that he was a good fellow, that he had spent $1.2 billion in make-work programs to increase employment. The fact is the budget only talked about $500 million. I
Adjournment Debate
do not know where the other money came from. Perhaps the Minister was looking at his budgetary figures. His budget increased the amount to offset unemployment by $500 million. He went on to say something about $400 million going to the railways and that this was important. One of the major railways is a Crown corporation. The other is a corporation run by Mr. Sinclair, a friend of the Government.
Perhaps it will accomplish something, but I do not see anywhere in the budget the dynamism and creativity of the private sector being encouraged or the financial health of the private sector being able to expand and prosper. The Minister knows that. The Government only pays lip service to private enterprise, lip service to dynamism in the private sector. In fact, it really does not care about the private sector, particularly in terms of employment.
A tax on employing people was levied in this budget to the extent of $1.7 billion. That tax will increase unemployment in this country by approximately 46,700 people during the next year. The Minister may ask how I figure that out. The answer is simple; the same way the Minister figured out that by spending $500 million he would create 60,000 jobs for a total of 18 months or between 17,000 and 18,000 person-years of work.
As a rule of thumb, a 1 per cent increase in real gross national product yields a 1 per cent increase in employment. If you take the 1971 base calculations as determined by the Conference Board and relate the present GNP to 1971, this year we would have about $130.4 billion in GNP. The effect of the $1.7 billion charge has to be a detriment to the GNP of .0447. If you do the mathematics, you will find if you multiply by the current number of people unemployed that you will have lost 46,700 person-years of work.
The effect of the budget presented by the Government will be that it costs jobs in Canada, costs the private sector, hurts the Canadian economy and is a total detriment. It will boost the public sector, boost Crown corporations, create more Government in our lives and work in exact opposition to the principles the Minister enunciated, principles that we could go along with, but principles he clearly does not believe in.


Douglas Glenn Fisher: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to engage in a debate with my colleague from Mississauga South (Mr. Blenkarn). I ask him only to turn to Mississauga to find some of the answers to the very honest questions he has raised.
May I point out to him that help on the interest rate front has assisted a variety of individual firms and companies in Mississauga over the past year, companies like DAF Indal, which manufactures helicopters, Control Data, which makes computers, Northern Telecom, which makes telephones, Ontario Bus Industries, with its bus export program and, in his own riding, the Admiral Corporation, which received help under the ILAP Program to continue in the business of manufacturing appliances.
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November 23, 1982
Adjournment Debate
In the housing area we have seen great market action as a result of the $3,000 grants. Because it reduces interest rates, the $3,000 grant to existing home owners, reduces the impact of high mortgage rates. We have also seen the increase to 27,500 non-profit units in the June budget. On the small business front, thanks to the hard work of the finance committee and the sensitivity of the Minister of Finance (Mr. Lalonde), we saw in the October statement clarification of the 12.5 per cent corporate dividend distribution tax. This provides additional relief. We saw the continuation of the small business bond and the introduction of the 4 per cent interest reduction program in the June budget.
To some degree, my hon. friend from Mississauga South reminds me of a quotation I saw in The Globe and Mail. As you know, that venerable newspaper has been complaining about the impact of high interest rates for sometime now and has been raising distressing stories about the impact of such rates. Just last week 1 saw a classic headline that said, "Lower interest rates inflict damage on savers." I wonder if the Hon. Member is not falling into that school of thought as well. [Translation]


Mr. Deputy Speaker:: Order, please. The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly, this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 2 p.m.
At 10.26, the House adjourned, without question put, pursuant to Standing Order.

Wednesday, November 24, 1982