OTTAWA — Rural Dignity co-ordinator Cynthia Patterson took barely a few seconds last week to bask in her lobby group’s win.
Then, she adopted a more familiar pose on rural postal closings.
“We have some questions to ask the government,” she said by telephone from her home on Quebec’s GaspŽ shore. “This is great news but we need a commitment not just to stop the erosion but to start the rebuilding.”
Patterson’s remarks were a notice to the Liberals they are not off the hook even after announcing an end to rural postal closings and conversions.
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For the almost seven years since Patterson was instrumental in launching the Rural Dignity lobby, she has been battling a Canada Post and Conservative policy to close or convert hundreds of rural post offices.
She has called Canada Post officials bullies and blackmailers. She sparred with Conservative MPs and suggested former minister Harvie Andre was an insensitive puppet of Canada Post bureaucrats.
She and her rural supporters organized rallies and songs during Conservative election events in 1988 and 1993.
When Canada Post president Don Lander was inducted into the Order of Canada last year, she helped organize a demonstration outside Government House.
In turn, post office officials suggested she was a partisan working for the unions while Conservative MPs called her a union dupe.
Through it all, the quiet-spoken bed-and-breakfast operator pushed ahead with her message and her organizing.
Feb. 17, when the Liberals announced an end to the closures, was a good day.
There have been bad days.
There was the day Andre mocked opponents of the closure policy, arguing that private outlets with longer hours were serving rural people better. “The mystic proportions some people are ascribing to rural post offices … are a thing of the past,” he said in the Commons in 1990.
There was the day in 1990 a Conservative-dominated Commons committee recommended Canada Post be sold to the private sector as soon as it was making money. “We do not think it is a function of Canada Post to operate rural meeting places,” said committee chair and later Tory minister Garth Turner.
