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jutj Turner takes bite out of illinformed critics I spend a lot of time my tongue Being a politician 1 ve learned means taking a lot of hits My first inclination is to defend myself and try to tell my side of the story But usually I don t I figure anybody who writes an angry to the editor dumping on the feds or me or both won have their mind changed easily And I hardly have enough time to do my job without devoting resources to selfdefence Sometimes however I will res pond Today is one of those times A week or two ago an open let ter appeared in a bunch of papers addressed to me and writ ten by Liz Armstrong a member of the lobby group Rural Dignity and anon resident of this riding In that letter she accused me of aiding in the destruction of rural Canadian postal service I had lied to her in the past Armstrong said by my writing a committee report in Ottawa sug gesting Canada Post eventually be pnvatized you have effectively thrown all rural service to the wolves And she criticized me for refusing to spend m tax payers money to have my com mittee tour rural communities Shortly after that letter a column appeared in the Toronto Star pen ned by Michele which was about the government of Canada picking apart the of Canada The feds goal she added is to erode the idea of a central govern ment by whittling away at public institutions that give us a sense of Canadian identity The sort of said it all Tones put their stamp on rural life Well Landsberg found the proof of this vicious plot in Cheltenham Yes Cheltenham No she doesn t live there She lives in downtown Toronto but got in her car one day and drove all the way out to visit the Cheltenham General Store after talking to Rural Dignity which is Arm strongs outfit financed in part by one of the postal unions And there found that the postmistress was soon to retire and the owners of the store would take over operation of the post office located within it Said an outraged The dismantling of rural postal services is an insidious process they may learn its true nature later on Neither of these women let much of the truth get in their way I guess that would have spoiled the government argument they were trying to build First a reply to Liz Armstrong I am not a supporter of reduction postal services The report the all party Consumer and Corporate Af fairs committee wrote and presented to the government said no existing post office should be shut down unless a replacement one opens Clear enough The report also recommended that shares in Canada Post be sold to employees and taxpayers and that service levels be guaranteed by the creation of a monitoring agency with full powers How does that throw rural ser vice to the wolves Armstrong sounds to me a lot like Jean Claude Parrot the postal union leader who told my committee his workers did Halt cmPeel PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE not want profit sharing schemes at Canada Post Maybe he should try asking them An efficient Canada Post benefits everybody The corpora tion used to suck million a year from the veins of taxpayers Now this year it will be paying the country a million dividend And this is bad news This s something wc should be ashamed of Give me a break Go back and enjoy the Century As for big city newspaper Michele Landsberg maybe she should screw up the courage to venture back to Cheltenham The postmistress did retire at the end of June Andy and Candis Roussos did take over operation of the postal outlet And has there been a change You bet there has The post of fice is now open longer The postmistress used to shut it down over the lunch period for an hour or two and now there s always someone around to sell you stamps or take your letters from eight in the morning until six at night and on Saturday until noon If this is an insidious process then maybe we should have more it If opening the Cheltenham post office two extra hours a day is picking apart the fabric of Canada then this country is more trouble than even I thought it Theie are more places in Canada to buy stamps and mail letters than there ever were The post of fice is making money instead of losing it in buckets Public com plaint levels have gone down and service standard have gone up Is Canada Post perfect Absolutely not It can get better It can serve better But nobody me at the first of the lute is trying to gut rural postal service Anyone who s got proof had better stop hiding in the skirts of open letters and makebelieve articles I m waiting With NutriSystem I said goodbye to 50 lbs forever Everybody tells me how great I look since I lost the weight What they don realize is that I maintained my weight loss for months now You see at NutriSystem I learned the importance of being active How it not only helps you burn extra calories and lose weight faster it also helps you maintain your weight loss This means that my tennis outfits may change but they II always be the same size Our Comprehensive Weight Loss Program Will Help Over ONE MILLION Clients 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