In the waning days of the Mulroney government, Harvey Andre loved to brag about what Canada Post was doing in rural Canada.
it was closing post offices and contracting the service to local businesses and Andre was the minister in charge.
Almost everyone approved of the changes, he would bellow at his opponents. The critics were old-fashioned, irrelevant romantics.
It is a lasting image.
With his refrigerator build, bully style and belligerent snarl, the Calgary MP was like a performer on the World Wrestling Federation circuit. Andre the Giant-in-His-Own-Mind, you might call him.
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As minister responsible for Canada Post during its conversion from a service Crown Corporation to an aggressive company with a bottom-line obsession, Andre was in his glory.
June 10, 1993, was his last chance. Parliament was six days away from dissolution, to be followed by an autumn election. Ontario Liberal Jim Jordon took one last poke at him about rural complaints of declining service. “On behalf of all the people who live in rural and small town Canad
a, I want to ask the minister when is Canada Post going to start delivering the mail in rural Canada?”
Andre was abrasive.
The “independent auditors” Ernst and Young had concluded mail is delivered on time 98 percent of the time, he said. And 80 percent of rural people told Canada Post surveyors they were happy with their new retail postal outlet.
He mocked as old-fashioned those who thought the post office was a social centre in rural Canada.
Well, three years later, consultant George Radwanski was hired by the Liberals to investigate Canada Post.
He found quite a gap between Tory dismissals of rural complaints and the reality.
Through briefs, letters and conversations, the “vast majority” of rural residents felt their service had deteriorated.
As for the 98-percent delivery success, Radwanski found that the post office had not set a rural delivery standard, so it could not fail.
And in answer to Andre’s mocking dismissal of those who clung to their rural post offices as community centres, Radwanski wrote:
“It serves as a social hub, as a federal presence and, in effect, as evidence that the national government still cares about each community and its residents.”
Instead of Andre’s 80-percent approval, Decima Research told Radwanski that 80 percent of rural residents “are united in this view of the damage inflicted on communities by post office closings.”
The Liberal government has vowed to take these findings to heart, improving rural postal service.
And Andre?
Well, he did not contest the last election but rural voters united to defeat every single Tory candidate.
In some small communities that had lost their post offices, more than a few voters probably wished Harvey Andre’s name had been one of their choices.
The election result would have been so much sweeter if they had been able to dispatch him personally.
