Mr. GRAYDON:

It is not mine, either.

The CHAIRMAN:

Order.

Mr. LESAGE:

I have also received a letter from the rural mail couriers' association. They favour a basic mileage rate which would assure every courier a reasonable wage for the amount of work done. The secretary of the association says:

We do agree with Postmaster General Bertrand that a fixed mileage rate would be impossible, but rural delivery is at all times under supervision and we believe a plan could be worked out to take care of "out of the ordinary" routes.

I do not think that we can classify some routes as ordinary and others as extraordinary. All routes are completely different. Many factors enter into a study of the cost in each case.

There are two objections to a flat rate: first it would mean a heavy cost to the country and to the taxpayers. The system was tried in the United States and it was an unhappy experience. The authorities still regret having adopted such a system.

Costs vary because of many factors. First there is the factor of weather. In my constituency, for instance, in the summer a courier delivers the mail with an automobile and in winter with a horse-drawn vehicle. It means that all- during the winter he has his car in the garage doing nothing and there is depreciation taking place all the year round although he uses it for only six months. During the- summer he must feed his horses. There is also depreciation on the horse and on the vehicle. It doubles the capital cost involved. This situation does not apply in the most southerly part of Ontario, and I believe the same can be said for the island) of Vancouver. There is also this factor: some routes are very hilly; others are not. Some- are paved; others are not. Some are muddy; others are not.

In the Vancouver district there are 112 routes, and the total number of box holders is 21,005. In the postal district of Edmonton the number of -routes is 165, and the total number of box holders is only 9,360; therefore -the situation is not the same at all. On one route you may have a box every quarter of a mile; on another route you may have one every 100 or 200 yards. Every route is different. With all due respect -to what has been said on this matter, and with' all diue -respect to the hon. member for Peel, I believe the best way out of the difficulty is to continue the tender system, and when a special situation arises, as it does here because of the higher cost of living, we must deal with it according to what is fair and just.

Mr. TUSTIN:

I d-o not think it is necessary to fight the cause of the rural mail couriers. Every hon. member knows the situation in which the mail courier is placed. Every hon. member who comes from a rural constituency knows what a fine job these men are doing. Many of them are not paid nearly enough to cover the expenses incurred- in the job which they have undertaken.

I should like to know how the department arrives at the wartime bonus. What is the operational bonus? No doubt the minister will take the stand that he is trying to bring these routes up to a certain number of dollars a mile. I should like to draw the attention of the committee to a case or two which I have before me, and I have many. In one county -where the routes run out on an angle,

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one courier is getting $60 a mile and his neighbour is getting $28.41 a mile. Both these men are given a wartime bonus. I should think that when the bonus was applied for and the minister or the department saw fit to grant it. at least both these men should have been given a bonus which would bring them up to approximately the same amount per mile.

Let me mention another case. One courier has a route which is 43-2 miles long. The next door neighbour has a route of 29 miles. The difference in the pay of the two men is $125 a year. The minister should look into these cases and so arrange matters that the bonuses are not such as to bring about discrimination against some of these couriers.

I should like the minister to tell us how he arrives at the wartime bonus and the operational bonus, because some of these routes have been up for tender since the end of the war, and wartime bonuses are being paid on them at the present time.

Mr. REID:

On many occasions I have lis-tended to discussions about mail couriers, and I know that every hon. member, including myself, is in sympathy with the views expressed by the hon. member for Peel. I wrote to the mail couriers and propounded this question- and hon. members might just as well face it when we are dealing with this matter. I asked them this question: Will you give me some advice as to what stand I should take if a committee is set up to deal with the matter and the government proposes to place the rural mail carriers in so far as employment is concerned under the same conditions as the postmaster? What do you think will happen or what do you suggest should be done with the present mail couriers? That is a practical question. It is a problem that should be solved by the house. What will you do with that great group? Will you fire them and make appointments under the civil service commission, or will you take these men and some women, some of whom are seventy years of age, back into the service?

While I am not going to extol the tender system I believe it is the one and only system left in the government service at which no one can point a finger and say there is patronage there, either civil service patronage or any other; and on this I shall have something to say later in the session. One cannot point the finger of political patronage at the system, because it is done by tender. Mileage is only one aspect of the matter. In the constituency I have the honour to represent we have the largest number of box holders of any rural route in Canada. We had last year on one route as many as 750 box holders, whereas in 83166-23*

Ontario or Quebec 65 would be regarded as a good route. How are you going to deal with the man wrho has to take care of 780 box holders? He goes early in the morning and sorts his mail and is lucky if he gets home at five o'clock at night.

Before the matter is dealt with, I think a committee should study it, because there are many adjustments to be made. While there are rural postmasters who may be doing a good deal of work, there are many in the country who are doing very well. I know of rural postmasters who are receiving up to $1,500 a year, over fifty per cent of the cost of stamps, and when it comes to selling their business they have no sad story to tell because they hold out to the intending buyer to the end. I join with the member for Peel in pointing out that there are many aspects of the situation that have not yet been mentioned.

Mr. IRVINE:

I see no reason why I should oppose the resolution; so far as it goes it brings some benefit to people who are badly in need of attention. On the other hand, I find myself in substantial agreement with the point of view expressed by the member for Peel.

I do not think we should regard this resolution as adequately meeting the situation which confronts the rural mail carriers throughout the country. I appreciate, of course, the difficulties presented by the hon. member for Montmagny-L'Islet. He did open up the subject sufficiently for us to see how great the difficulties are in effecting improvements which will be fairly satisfactory throughout the dominion. But to say that just because difficulties exist we must accept a defeatist attitude and not try to do anything about it seems an unreasonable position to take. It is precisely because the difficulties are there that we should adopt some suggestion such as has been made by the member for Peel. I do not see any reason why, while carrying this resolution and proceeding with that slight improvement, the house should not appoint a special committee to make a complete investigation of the whole delivery system in the rural districts of Canada. And here the viewpoints of the men who drive the mails, and of the various rural postmasters, should be considered in the effort to find a solution.

Some hon. members today have spoken about hundreds of mail boxes, and so on. I can tell you of mail routes with hundreds of miles to a mail box, where the rural mail deliveries are tremendous tasks, where the man in charge may be away two or three days and

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may not get back for a week sometimes because of snow drifts and other difficulties. If it were not that some of these routes are being carried on by men who have to drive them on occasions, whether they take the mail or not, the men could not possibly do the work for the remuneration paid.

I suggest therefore that the minister give serious consideration to the suggestion of the member for Peel. The matter should not be left here with the passing of this resolution or with the enacting of the legislation which may be brought in to implement it; further investigation should be made by this house for the purpose of finding at least a better solution. I do not suppose there is any perfect solution, but we should try to find a better one for the grievances which, as every one of us knows, are very real throughout the country.

Mr. BOUCHER:

I do not think we should look at this question entirely from the standpoint of the mail courier: If we compare the service that- Canadians receive in the urban areas with that given in the rural areas, we shall see that the problem is a bigger one than that. The compensation to the courier has a direct effect on the service to the community.

Rural mail delivery is, I think, one of the greatest social advantages enjoyed by people in the country, and it is one thing in these days of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation which we as members of parliament should look into. In rural areas remote from city, town or village post office, the mail courier goes out only on fair days, it being impossible for him to operate on stormy days or in foul weather. In the remote country districts the courier comes within a mile or three-quarters of a mile or perhaps half a mile of the home and people have to walk that distance to get their mail. I suggest that the compensation to the mail courier has a direct bearing on the service to the community, and therefore the tender system, which takes into account the effect on the economy of the government, has little significance to the people who get their mail delivered to them in this way. Indeed, it has a detrimental effect.

I suggest that every member should support the minister in increasing the pay of the couriers, but we shall be disappointed in him if he does not go furtheor than the present resolution would indicate he is inclined to go.

Throughout the country there is a conflict between the services in mail delivery to urban residents and to rural residents. I do not think we in this house should do anything which would impede the service given the rural residents as compared with the service provided in urban areas. I do not think that

mileage is entirely the correct basis, and perhaps the number of box holders may not be even as efficient a standard as mileage. But there are more complicated questions to be tackled by this house, and we should not refuse to go the whole way and improve the situation, merely because there is some difficulty in calculating the index for compensation. If we are to be deterred by that difficulty, we are not competent to discharge our duty to those who sent us here.

Let us take the matter in our hands and decide to have a committee of the house select a much more efficient, if perhaps not a perfect, method of providing a better service to the rural areas and a greater measure of justice to the mail couriers. To this end I would urge the appointment of a select committee to go into the whole question and bring in recommendations to the house so that the matter may be dealt with as soon as possible.

Mr. SINCLAIR (Vancouver North):

I

' had not intended to speak on this resolution- I thought it would receive the support of every hon. member-until I sat next to my colleague the hon. member for Montmagny-L'lslet and casually glanced at this excellent analysis of rural mail delivery statistics for Canada for March 31, 1946. In the seven years I have been a member of parliament I am sorry to say that I have been unable to get one single rural mail route established in my riding. There have been many parts of my riding which have demanded one, but every time the answer from the Postmaster General's department was to the effect that there were sufficient points of call in those rural areas of Sechelt, Robert's Creek and Powell River; I accepted that, and in blind faith passed that word back to my constituents. I now see a column here which certainly removes the hood from my eyes. I want to read to the committee the figures as to average number of boxes per route for districts across Canada. In the Calgary postal district the average number of boxes per route is 52; Moose Jaw, 35; Winnipeg, 59; North Bay, 50; Quebec, 54; Saint John, 41; Halifax, 47; Charlottetown, 52. In British Columbia- note this figure-there are 188. In other words we must have three times the number of boxes on a route before we can get it approved. The routes are all about the same length. They' average in length from twenty to thirty miles. So when the minister introduces the bill to be based on this resolution I think in fairness to all British Columbia members he should explain why there is this difference in standard, why the number of box holders required on a route in British Columbia is

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three times that required in any other part of Canada. If he will do that I shall be able to go back to my people in my riding and explain it to them I hope to their satisfaction.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

Mr. Chairman, the questions are piling up and the minister is still silent, but possibly one or two further questions would not disturb him too much. I concur in all that the hon. member for Peel has said. Everyone believes that the rural mail carriers should receive the bonus or an amount equivalent to the bonus. The minister has stated that some 4,034 carriers were paid the bonus during the period of the war, and that a number of others, I think some two thousand, were not.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

May I correct the hon. gentleman?. The 4,034 were those that asked for bonuses. The 4,164 were those who did not ask for them because their contracts were renewed, and at a time when these gentlemen knew what it would cost and therefore put on a higher figure.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

So the situation is this, in so far as the last number mentioned by the minister is concerned: these carriers are actually receiving an amount which must have taken into consideration the bonus to which they would have been entitled. Under this resolution the minister will be entitled to determine the payment of bonuses-with which no one can disagree-and he is to be authorized by parliament to pay moneys under mail contracts supplemental to the amount agreed to be paid to the contractor.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

We are now getting into the details of the bill.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

No; I am discussing the resolution.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

According to the bill, the Postmaster General will be allowed to pay a supplement to a contract which might be signed today, but only after the contract has been in operation for one year, and only when the contractor is able to furnish to the Postmaster General the reasons why he needs a bonus, which condition might arise in a year or so. He would have to furnish the Postmaster General with good and sufficient reason why he did not bid high enough when he put in his tender.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

That is exactly the point, and I know the Postmaster General's experience in the past has been that sometimes a person can make mistakes in recommendations. The minister will be in the position of determining which of the carriers shall receive an additional amount and which shall

not. It is against the placing of such a power in the hands of the minister that I rise to protest. I accept the necessity of all who have contracts receiving an amount equivalent to the bonus, but I deny the right of any minister to determine who shall be the beneficiary of an additional amount to be decided by him.

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

It cannot be chosen by the minister.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

The resolution says, "to authorize".

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

No.

Mr. DIEFENBAKER:

The minister is not going to have that power, then?

Mr. BERTRAND (Laurier):

If a supplement is granted to a new contractor. Suppose a contract is signed tomorrow or the day after this bill comes into force. In that case he cannot ask for a change in the amount of his contract until one full year has elapsed, and only then if he comes before the officials of the department and gives the reasons why he needs more. Those reasons must be sufficient to indicate that it would not be fair for the Postmaster General to continue the contract at the original price. Furthermore, anybody who has a contract with the Postmaster General may at any time cancel his contract on giving due notice.