Thank you, and good evening, Mr. Chair.

I'm joined today by my colleagues Manon Fortin, our chief operating officer, and Rindala El-Hage, our vice-president of finance and our comptroller.

Thank you so much for having us today, and to the committee for undertaking this very timely study on the postal service in Canada's rural and remote communities.

The work you're doing is very important.

I look forward very much to this report.

Like so many other businesses, Canada Post must adapt to the dramatic changes in how Canadians live and work—and shop, in our case.

Our recently released annual report makes it crystal clear that the postal service is facing major challenges financially and operationally. My focus is on how we can best meet the needs and expectations of Canadians both now and into the future with a focus on them, our customers.

Canada Post provides a service and a network that Canadians consider essential. We connect all 17.4 million addresses daily in the second-largest country in the world. We connect our country and our economy. Canadians depend on us because we deliver everywhere—not just where it would be most profitable for us.

Our service can be a lifeline for many Canadians. For small businesses, it allows them to compete in a market dominated by large, multinational e-commerce giants. For Canadians in rural and remote areas, Canada Post is one of their only delivery options. As the postal system changes, these rural and remote communities cannot get left behind.

We have to be there for them; we want to be there for them.

By now you've seen—and we've seen—our financial results, so I won't get into all of the details, but let me highlight a few of our challenges.

First is lettermail, which used to be our primary revenue source but continues to decline, as it does around the world in this advancing digital age. In 2006, each household received an average of seven letters a week. Last year, it was just two.

At the same time and going in the opposite direction, a growing population means that we deliver to more addresses every year—in fact, three million more compared with 2006. More addresses mean that our delivery costs continue to rise, and, year after year, the financial gap between the price of postage and the cost of providing the service widens.

We've also seen challenges in parcel delivery. Parcels are the very future of the company, and we've been making critical investments in service and capacity to better compete. Last year, these investments helped us achieve some of our best-ever service performance results in our entire history.

However, the parcel delivery market has become hyper competitive. We're going head-to-head, toe-to-toe against established global players and low-cost new entrants that emerged through the pandemic. As a result, our parcel delivery market share has been cut by more than half since 2019.

Mr. Chair, Canadians need a strong postal service, particularly in rural and remote communities.

We need to adapt quickly to be there for them.

For this important study, let me offer my thoughts on what a future Canada Post could look like.

To me, it requires the following.

Number one is becoming much more nimble and innovative, focused on the changing needs of our customers.

Number two is being able to invest in priority areas such as our network and bringing our legacy systems out of the Dark Ages, further improving safety for our people and continuing to green our operations.

Number three is having a delivery model with the flexibility to offer weekend deliveries, next-day deliveries and other innovative services that Canadians want.

Number four is making our post office network more small-business friendly and an easy-to-access growth hub for Canada's budding entrepreneurs.

Lastly, number five, we need a refreshed regulatory approach that provides flexibility to act quickly in today's hyper-competitive parcel market, while providing the appropriate checks and balances in terms of government oversight.

That's my vision for modernizing Canada Post.

Canada Post will continue to be there for all Canadians and Canadian businesses. We will keep working hard to evolve the postal system to reflect how Canadians use our service today and, more importantly, how they're going to use it tomorrow.

Significant change is required urgently and we're prepared for and committed to leading this change and working closely with the federal government and our bargaining agents. Canadians expect us to work together—in your roles as legislators and ours as management—to find workable solutions to evolve and preserve this great national infrastructure.

I look forward to our discussion.

Thank you.