Milk Marketing Board | General comparisons | Discussion forum

I guess we will see a "CHEESE SURCHARGE" coming to your pizza parlour soon!!!! lol

Believe it or not there are some Pizza Parlours in BC that have the cheap 2 for 1 and the cheese is artificial.

If you'd asked 20 year old Doug back in 2003 if he thought Canada Post should be privatized, if the Canadian Wheat Board should be maintained or if the various government marketing boards maintained, his answer to each would've been an emphatic: "no"; "yes"; "yes".

Now, I'm not so sure. Canada Post isn't generating the profits (it's generating losses) and dividends for the Canadian government (it's a burden) and it's reach/necessity into Canadians' lives (particularly) rural Canadians is that much less, thanks to the above-noted reasons. With $6.5 billion in shortfall to its pension obligations to what is an overly-generous and fully-indexed pension, Canada Post delivering less and less mail and rural Canadians not depending on them as much, the time has come to recapitalize Canada Post. What I'd do: implement the changes as outlined with the possible exception of the stamp price increases or phasing out of "Permanent" stamps, go further and reduce mail delivery to four days per week in suburban/rural areas and keep it at five days per week in urban areas. I'd have Canada Post buy back (from its employees and Kelowna Flightcraft Ltd) the roughly 10% of Purolator Canada Ltd that it does not already own (Purolator is its prized, growing and profitable asset) then I'd give 40% of Canada Post Corporation away to a new union-sponsored health & pension benefits trust that in exchange for relieving Canada Post of all previously committed pension obligations. It would be up to that trust to manage its Canada Post shares to generate maximum return for its current employees and pensioners and, where a shortfall exists, they need to have a conversation about perhaps cutting back on benefits for pensioners (and the financial impact would be modest - they already get generous pensions between 50% and twice the amount of what full CPP and OAS pay and once you factor CPP/OAS in plus payments from RRIFs/TFSAs, they can easily afford a cutback). Then, I'd sell part of the remaining 60% of Canada Post in an IPO and have an arms-length Crown corporation decide when it is most advantageous to sell the remainder. I'd also be in favour of allowing Canada Post to get into retail banking, insurance and wealth management sales via its retail postal outlets, but that decision should be done once it's privatized with no burden on the taxpayer. That way, management can decide whether they want to engage a partnership model with other banks (whereby those banks pay Canada Post when its customers use them to access their accounts with those banks, like the UK Post Office does) or if it makes sense for them to have their own proprietary, competitive banking & wealth products and services distributed via its retail postal outlets - whatever is more profitable.

To ensure minimum service delivery standards at maintained, legislation should be introduced to give the Canadian Transportation Agency (no need to create a new regulatory agency) the authority to set those minimum standards for postal delivery (i.e., outlets within a geographic distance of each other, minimum delivery days per week, etc.) that Canada Post would be required to adhered to (with its monopoly).

As for the Canadian Wheat Board, it seems to me a bit of an anachronism. Farmers don't seem to have a problem fetching proper prices for their wheat, and its monopoly on barley was recently removed, thanks to globalization so why force them to sell to a single buyer? I'm a federal Liberal to the core, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. Same with the Egg & Poultry Board, the Milk Board and various other marketing boards. Let's deregulate them and, while we're at it, truly eliminate foreign ownership restrictions on all Canadian telecom companies, not just those with under 10% market share.

Cheers,
Doug