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The corporation employs 16,000 people eligible to retire in the next five years, with 14,000 more eligible for retirement in the five years after. In total, that’s more than half of the 55,000 workers represented by CUPW.
More than half of postal workers are due to retire over the next decade. Canada Post could shrink its workforce by half without laying anyone off, just by instituting hiring freezes.
In the mean time it could scale back general mail services (don’t need daily door to door delivery) and focus on parcels and offer special services for seniors, people with disabilities, and other folks with special needs. Only 1/3 of 15 million Canadian households receive door to door delivery anyway. Those folks can walk a few minutes down the street to a community mailbox just like the other 2/3 of Canadians have been doing for decades now. Leave the expensive services to those who actually request them based on need.
At the same time, Canada Post needs to be able to set its own postage rates rather than having them set by law. I believe this was changed in a recent bill but I’m not sure on the status of this. Postage rates that actually reflect the cost of delivery would encourage more businesses to switch away from sending unnecessary mail, such as paper bills and statements to customers who have already tried to opt out of them (yes, this happens).
Maybe match the organization to what we actually do in 2025.
I don’t care about the specifics, or turning a profit, I want something that functions and meets our needs.
I definitely don’t need mail delivery 5 times a week.
Make it a utility again and stream line it. Not everything needs to be a “for profit” entity. Nobody needs mail delivery 5 days a week. Use community mailboxes instead of door-to-door. It’ll bring the citizens closer over time and that community feel will return again. Lots of ideas could be produced to make it better and the best thing is it’s not rocket science so we don’t need to pay a consultant huge amounts of cash to think for us.
Yes.
I will argue that I’m pissed at the union as much as leadership here.
I generally like unions, but things need to change and they’re acting like any change is an abuse.
Like Bob Dylan said (paraphrasing)…“Unions are big business. It was a good idea until greed got in the way.”
Get rid of the dumb legislation that says Canada Post has to both turn a profit and be legally obligated to provide money losing services. The legislation is obviously designed to ensure that Canada Post is eventually split up and privatized.
Anyone who says Canada Post is a business is a moron…no business is legally required to lose money.
Canada Post owns 91% of Purolator
Purolator is VERY profitable at the expense of Canada Post.
This is an example of why we can’t have nice things
Effed up, right? They blew their endowment buying a private company because they got forced to be profitable…they’re still not profitable, because it’s impossible…and the politicians are pretending the endowment that would have kept pensions solvent never existed.
Treating public services like a business needs to end. Sure you can call it a crown “corporation”, but its purpose is to serve citizens in a defined way, not to make a profit.
If the postal service is subject to this scrutiny, why not the military as well?
I understand the argument that government services shouldn’t have to run a profit, but government funding should still be for meaningful services that people actually use. I only get maybe 5-6 relevant pieces of mail per year, and then a ton of junk. I don’t need service 5 days a week straight to my doorstep.
Our civilization has changed and mail delivery has lost much of its importance - how much we fund it should reflect that change in importance. A somewhat contrived example, but we don’t expect the government to continue paying for lamplighters to go out each evening and light streetlamps, because the need for flame based streetlamps (and their lighters) has decreased. Similarly, the demand for mail service has decreased (because of email) and we can get by with less postal carriers. Someone saying “the lamp-lighting crown corporation shouldn’t have to run a profit” completely ignores that maybe we don’t need as many lamplighters.
There’s still lots of domestic mail in the form of packages. And the working conditions of package delivery drivers is pretty terrible. Why not hit two birds with one stone and mandate that all domestic mail must be delivered by Canada Post?
How do you define domestic mail for packages? If I’m coming over to your house for dinner and I bring you a gift, am I delivering mail?
What about ordering pizzas or other food delivery? Coffee beans?
A lot of mail is business to business anyway. I work in a mailroom at a business who receives tens of thousands of pieces of mail per week. By far the majority of that mail comes from other businesses, not individuals, and it really ought to be sent electronically. I personally have opened and scanned thousands of pieces of mail which then get shredded (after a retention period) without anyone ever reading the paper documents. The rest of the business only operates on the electronic versions (PDFs from our scanning), not the paper copies.
We also send out tens of thousands of paper cheques per month by mail. These could all be e-transfers but for the cost of upgrading old software systems. That cost calculation changes dramatically when postage rates go up.
That’s ultimately the crux of the matter: costs. Canada Post is not even close to competitive with other parcel delivery services. They don’t have to worry about competing with letter mail because of a legally enforced monopoly.
You’re not getting paid to move a gift. USPS is.
Food delivery is a good point though, the perishablility of the package might have exceptions. Most food delivery needs to be delivered within an hour, and the majority is delivered within 20 minutes. Such deliveries are also super local, rarely if ever going farther than 60km. You could say food deliveries of under 50km are exempt, which would probably have some strange outliers, but I don’t think every package is going to get sent with free fries to circumvent this.
At the other end, enforcing better working conditions and possibly unions would go a long way, but good luck finding a politician in power willing to do that.
Perhaps a bit more flexible would be a tax on parcels, and Canada Post has no change beyond that.
At the end of the day, the focus on costs is the issue. The service Canada Post provides is mail access to nearly everyone. Private services will pick up the profitable routes, but they won’t cover nearly as many as Canada Post. If we shut down a service because the profitable routes have been taken by private services, people loose service and more people become dependent on private services.
Maybe the answer is to make Canada Post a charter agency, setting up infrastructure only where used, but required to cover any route requested. That might appease the corner cutters, but would maintain service to the people who need it. On the other hand, I don’t want to ceede any distance to deregulators, lest they use that as precedent to dismantle other services and the few remaining crown corps.
That’s really the larger issue. Arguing that services aren’t profitable in order to dismantle them in favour of private corporations. Our city does this with our busses all the time. Public transportation gets better the more of it you have, but people argue that it doesn’t make enough money so we should reduce service. What is a service worth? Why should we expect them to be profitable?
I think what you’re missing is that even if you had completely free, taxpayer-funded mail delivery you’d have corporations profiting off it: the corporations sending the mail.
Corporations send by far the majority of mail. In my job, I personally, have sent over 100,000 pieces of mail in a single week. Most of that mail gets sent to other businesses, not individual people. Why should taxpayers be subsidizing that?
Because a centralized universal solution is more efficient. Why should healthy people subsidize the sick? Why should drivers subsidize busses? Why should pedestrians subsidize highways? Why should people with solar panels subsidize power plants? Why have public services at all?
You could argue that businesses should pay more, but the fact that a service is useful is not an argument to shut it down.
Efficient? Not at all. The Canada Post situation is like those public transit systems that pay for a bunch of empty buses to drive around. Except no one needs mail delivery 5 days a week in order to hold down a job, while at least the empty buses are available for people to get to work or school or to doctor’s appointments.
Canada Post drivers drive the same route every day whether they have 1 letter to deliver or 1000. The reason they started delivering so much junk mail is because they’d otherwise be driving around with a bunch of empty trucks.
Private couriers don’t always do this. They make new routes based on the packages they have to deliver each morning. This is far more efficient than driving the same route every day. The difference is that you don’t have regular, predictable routes for 9-5 drivers to work every day. But this is an area where you get more efficiency out of not having guaranteed jobs.
Other private couriers may instead have fixed daily routes but they’re not the ones Canada Post has. Stuff like business-only routes where a courier will visit all the dentist’s offices, optometrists, doctor’s offices in an area. Another one may serve all the lawyers and their business clients in an area. Or all the architects and engineering firms and construction companies.
Canada Post can’t compete with these couriers because they can’t hire a set of drivers for every possible combination of specialized routes. Plus they don’t have the specialized knowledge that these businesses need. Things like specialized pickup and delivery times that fit around their daily schedule.
A single, centralized solution is really a “one-size fits all” that ends up being far less efficient and far more restrictive. It struggles to compete with myriad smaller businesses because it lacks a way to build and preserve institutional knowledge and specialized experience. It also lacks any incentive to innovate due to a lack of competition.
If Canada Post were truly the most efficient solution then it wouldn’t need a government-enforced legal monopoly to protect it from competition for letter mail. The reason it’s been struggling is that letter mail is dying and only parcel mail (which isn’t protected by the monopoly law) is still growing.
That’s ultimately what this is about. I don’t think anyone on here would argue that we should still be running Morse code telegraph services for people to communicate. It’s obsolete technology that no one wants to use anymore. Letter mail is heading exactly the same way.
I think it’s fair that businesses should be made to pay the true cost of delivering letter mail, but that will ultimately accelerate the decline as businesses look to cut down the amount of mail they send, up to and including passing on the cost of postage to customers who won’t opt-in to paperless communications.
Actually, literally why not. I bet you could come up with some kind of actuarial argument about what being undefended would cost us, on average.
It’s an expensive business to be in. If the military is going to turn a profit we’ll need to start looking for better wars to get involved in, ones that really maximize the opportunities for plunder.
Ah, but you aren’t considering the downside risk that [insert badguy nation] invades us and turns us all into slaves.
Car or house insurance doesn’t turn a profit for the policyholder either. It’s not exactly the same thing, but in both cases it’s purely preventative, while still an economic good idea.
Sure, you’ve got to consider both sides of the equation: Use your military might to plunder distant lands faster and harder than their armies are able to plunder your own land. It’s the fiscally prudent way to run things.
[Smell of tea and silly hats intensifies]
I mean ok, like point taken, and it’s a good one. But what’s the amount of money that should be spent on something that can be privatized without affecting public welfare vs how much should be allocated to stuff like health care, pharmacare, education, etc.? Stuff that has more of an effect on public welfare.
Stop and take an honest look at what you get in the mail. If you are like me, it’s 98% junk and unsolicited mail, and 2% parcels, which are easily taken care of by the private sector. I mean once a year my grandma sends me cards or whatever, but why should we be burning 100’s of millions for this. Personally I’d way rather than funding get allocated to health care or education.
I get that people also lose jobs here though, and that legit sucks.
What stops private corporations from jacking up rates and discontinuing service to underserved areas without pressure from Canada Post?
That’s right, fuck all. The problem with this attitude is that because YOU don’t use Canada Post you assume nobody else does. Yes, traditional mail is not a big thing anymore. But what Canada Post does is fundamentally just delivery, and they could easily restructure around that.
Without it, you just cede another piece of critical infrastructure to American private companies. Need a package sent to a northern or rural area? Be prepared to pay the one American company that bothered to set up a route there astronomical prices in the name of profit.
Sending things to each other, from small businesses and across all areas in Canada should be a thing we offer and don’t just let Americans take over and kill unprofitable routes. It’s a great use of tax dollars, and just because it doesn’t matter to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter a whole lot to the person in Iqaluit who gets their cancer drugs that way.
So would you prioritize this over better cancer care in remote communities for example? Or an ability to get drugs cheaply? Because we are in the B range here, think about reallocating that money. Canada post can’t run itself effectively, without burning mass amounts of cash. That much has been proven. They are making claims that they are effectively insolvent.
I’ve lived in an nothern remote community before, I know what it’s like, very intimately. But there was a difference there, no one was getting cancer drugs through Canada Post, as they didn’t have the infrastructure. It was cheaper to use Canada Post, sure, but it was also weeks out. If you needed stuff faster, it had a cost, because it literally had a pretty big cost to get there. The remote areas pay a heavy price for shopping and cargo, end of sentence. Now should this cost be subsidized? I could argue yes or no, both sides. But this isn’t what is burning the amounts of money that they are, because Canada Post doesn’t focus a lot of resources up there either.
You need to really dig into the books to see where the cash is going, but I think it would cause pause for most. There’s been a lot of failed projects over the years, they tried to basically create their own Amazon like marketplace for example, and they burned a tremendous amount of capital doing so. That shouldn’t have ever been allowed to happen. They run a lot of mind numbing hours and resources in communities where it’s clearly going to waste, but are leaving other communities largely in the lurch, and where such human capital allocations would be better served.
Am I suggesting the elimination of mail service? Not necessarily. Does it need to come every day though? Should there be more boxes and centralized pickup spots, to realize some savings? Why are they in the parcel business, where they are literally competing with…themselves? (Canada post has an almost whole ownership of Purolator - which is profitable). So if they want to do parcels, why not sell that ownership off and reallocate that capital? Or maybe leave the parcels for Purolator, and extend some price controls.
There’s a lot that needs examined in this crown corp, and I for one am not really a fan of them just continuing to throw capital at it, where they have shown time and time again they can burn through it at a stupid fast rate, on some contra-intuitive projects.
The fact of the matter is, their junk mail production is the only thing keeping the lights on. That’s not an effective use of Canadian taxpayer capital. So how do we fix this then? Does it really make me such a bad person to question this?
I receive a lot of parcels via Canada Post. Probably more than via any other carrier. Canada Post is almost always the cheapest shipping available and often by significant margin. Cost of shipping will increase if it’s privatized. That means higher costs for many small businesses who now reach all of Canada. That means fewer sales, less money in local communities, more reliance on Amazon and Walmart, and more money leaving our communities, making us poorer. A cheap, national carrier is an economic enabler infrastructure for Canadians. I haven’t looked at analyses but I’m guessing it would be a net contributor in terms of welfare. Similar to high-speed rail.
Canada Post already has a package delivery service. They own 91% of Purolator which is highly profitable.
It’s mind numbing how no one is ever willing to look at some facts here. The way this crown corp has been run, and the decisions they have made (and the numerous failed projects they have burned massive amounts of cash on), I don’t understand why this can never be questioned…
You can request that you not receive unaddressed mail, it’s quite nice not having a mailbox stuffed with garbage.
Just because you may not use a postal service much doesn’t mean others don’t. It’s really the only option for those without mobile devices, computers, or internet access. Dismantling or privatizing the postal service would have a significant negative impact on seniors, elderly, and rural and remote communities.
We could easily afford a special service for those people without any other options without having to deliver mail 5 times a day to millions of people who do not need it. Those people you’re talking about are less than 10% of the population.
It’s like if we had a massive program to provide every single Canadian with their own service dog instead of just the people who want service dogs.
They are losing hundreds of millions a year though. That money could go a long way in other areas.
I’m not saying no mail, but maybe let’s think of solutions. Do I need every day delivery? Do we need post offices. I ain’t even suggesting it be profitable, but theres an extreme cash burn going on here. A lot of their services can be done by private companies pretty effectively (and I’m not a huge privatization guy). Hell they even own one (Purolator), so why the fuck are they also still messing around in the parcel world?
They aren’t losing anything, just as the military doesn’t lose money, nor the healthcare system. It is a public service.
That’s not accurate at all. You can’t just burn billions on billions on a public service then, without cuts somewhere else. You can’t equate mail to stuff like a military and health care, it’s not the same. Protection and basic human care for subsistence isn’t equitable to being able to mail a letter to someone, or to send someone junk mail.
The way forward for Canada Post is delivering the mail.
Public option banks, cell phone plans, and dry goods grocery store staples. Don’t try to out-Amazon Amazon. Let them take the bottom and do different things people want.
I think workers’ rights legislation would go a long way to making Canada Post more competitive even without many changes. It’s hard to compete with slavery.
Canada Post has to pay their employees benefits and vacation. All the other delivery companies are relying on the gig economy, and probably paying their “contractors” less than minimum wage, and certainly no benefits.
Also good ideas, but we definitely want to keep putting the postal banking idea out there as well
Working closer with the EU. We love Canada.
I’m not sure if it’s THE way forward, but video taping every single Canada post employee sucking and fucking each other in the world’s largest orgy would be very entertaining.
What I want is a half step between Letter mail, and regular parcel. Why do I have to pay the same price to ship out a package which weighs 50g as one that weighs 500g. Currently I can get around this with a stamp, but I would love to pay more.
