Now is the time to draw inspiration from wherever we can, and stand with workers while they fight the employer-led race to the bottom.
The Leap Manifesto had some very good ideas about using Canada Post as a vehicle for a green transition: https://rabble.ca/economy/postal-workers-launch-ambitious-proposal-could-redefine-canadas-economy/
We’re all being misled here raging over CP’s reform and its losses because ‘all I get is trash mail’. Why isn’t the management of Canada Post on the hook for this? Yet we’re here blaming the union of their mismanagement? After all, they’re the ones that are making the big bucks, so they know what they’re doing right? Right? Why aren’t any of these c-suite or board stepping down/let go from doing such a terrible job? 6 straight years, 24 financial quarters. Who let this ‘experiment’ run for so long? Did this never make a blip in some federal minister’s portfolio? Well at least we know who to blame for inaction during this time for this policy failure.
- As many other have pointed out, it’s a service, not a for-profit.
- The corpro Amazon contractor-undercutting wages problem
- The Libs aren’t willing to do the hard work to actually transform CP into a cost-recovery model and fix the point above. They’d rather just do the classic ‘cut services’ while only looking at a spreadsheet without really carefully considering what they are really doing. It’s a cut to peoples jobs which means less money flowing into the economy as a whole - especially given CP’s reach. Plus, wages paid out, the federal government still taxes it. You see what I’m seeing? The ditch isn’t as big as people make it to be. Again, the Libs are pissing away a crown corp jewel again.
- CP has so much more potential with what it can do with its storage, delivery, network and database without even doing major expenditures.
I think most of the problems with Canada Post is the commercialisation of it. 95% of my personal mail delivered to my community mailbox is flyers and scam inivitations to MLM’s. I’ve stopped regularly checking it every day because its always all garbage that I imeadiatly throw out. I usually check it every other week now. Plus if I get a parcel its almost always just a slip that I have to take to shoppers drug mart (not the more easily accessible post office). Its literally more convenient to get packages delivered by anyone else, because they will actually bring them to my door instead of waiting an hour in line at Shoppers so that an underpaid Shoppers drug mart employee can get me my package that any other service would have put directly into my hands.
I just want to take a moment to enjoy that the Canada Post thing is one of our country’s big political conversations. There’s a problem, and people have different solutions. Some of the solutions rely on false information or bad reasoning. Some of them are well-reasoned, but have different priorities to each other. The government will have to make a decision, and some will praise it, and some will criticize it, and it will make some peoples’ lives better, and some peoples’ lives worse.
But nobody’s using the Canada Post situation as a vehicle to hurt people they hate. People don’t seem to be moving in lockstep based on ideology and propaganda. Nobody’s been called a fascist over it because nobody’s been being a fascist over it. This is what politics should be like. It’s refreshing.
How to make Canada post profitable again:
- Force Amazon to follow the fucking law and pay all of their contractors-but- not-really as either actual contractors(they’ll make far more money), or as employees(they’ll make far more money)
- undo everything Stephen Harper and his cronies did.
Why is nobody clueing in that if Canada Post goes under we’re all gonna be stuck getting our legal documents and important mail via severely underpaid and over worked amazon delivery drivers!?
You get what you pay for. The short sightedness of all this is astounding.
What? No. Legal documents (i.e lawsuits) have to be hand-delivered as their delivery is witnessed.
You send important legal mail by CP? No one does that.
Sorry, but these clowns are milkmen and ice deliverers in a modern world. All I get is trash and mail delivered to the wrong address.
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The expectation that a vital public service must be a profitable company is just an ass-backward assumption from the start. What’s next, are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres?
You can have a vital postal service without paying postal workers $70,000/year to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week. Weekly delivery to community mailboxes plus supplemental home delivery for people with limited mobility would save a ton of money but it would mean laying off thousands of postal workers.
This whole dispute isn’t about a vital service, it’s about a jobs program that is unjustifiable in the modern day.
are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres
Welcome to Ontario! Hospitals ARE profit centers, if they don’t make enough money the board of directors have to make “changes.” With the cost of treatments being set by OHIP that means the only changes available are cuts in service or staff.
Canada Post and healthcare should be treated like a military. It is overhead, the cost of being a modern country, you can try to get the most bang for your buck but the goal is to provide the absolute best service not to turn a profit.
The debate is not about shutting down Canada Post completely, it’s about scaling back service due to rapidly falling demand. You can still have a vital postal service with weekly delivery to community mailboxes. I have received my mail at a community mailbox for over 30 years. These days I check the mail maybe twice a month. It’s a 3 minute walk each way. People with limited mobility who live in a community mailbox area can already sign up for special home delivery.
Not everything is a good idea to spend money on, though, even the government’s money. Door-to-door letter delivery seems pretty antiquated to me.
We still have a population where some members do not have cell phones or can’t operate a computer well enough to deal with e-life. Letters are still around for some time for billing, statements, property notices, legal services, etc
Yeah, I know. You can get them from a communal box too. I do.
Accessibility has been mentioned, but as far as I know a special program for people who are totally housebound has been proposed for that.
Why do any of those need door to door delivery on a daily basis? None of them are that urgent.
Delivery time always massively exceeds a reasonable pickup time, yeah.
So if your bill is produced say on the 1st of the month AFTER delivery was collected, now it sits till the post picks it up a week later, then transit across a province or country for several days where logistics have to work out for continuous flow, but then sits at next place for a weekly delivery, you can understand that a letter could take 2 weeks maybe 3, to reach you, and the payment due dates are sometimes short so you miss payment date, especially if you have to mail payment back. Legal documents also have response times for filings.
There are other examples but I think this illustrates why
Wrong. Businesses who send out large volumes of mail don’t wait for Canada Post to pick it up. They courier the mail to and from a CP sorting facility. I know this because I work in a mail room at a company. Even with weekly delivery for home addresses, businesses would still be sending and receiving mail on a daily basis.
Your bill would be produced and sent to a Canada Post sorting facility on the same day.
Furthermore, businesses are aware of mail transit delays. When they print the due dates on the bills they take this into account. Furthermore, businesses tend to have grace periods beyond the actual due date of the bill for this very reason.
Lastly, I will point out that the company I work for is still printing and inserting bills into envelopes even though the post offices are closed. This mail is packed in crates stacked floor to ceiling in the hallway and will be sent to Canada Post when the strike is over. If the strike goes on for a long time, many customers will receive their bills long after the due date. Customers are still expected to pay their bills on time although extra allowances are granted on a case by case basis. Many customers do use electronic transfers or pre-authorized debits from their bank accounts and so they don’t have any extra reason to miss a payment.
CP hasn’t delivered daily for years
Citation needed.
Who only deliver to and around places that are profitable.
We should all stop using Amazon, first and foremost, then we should move to Canadian alternatives.
I don’t use Amazon. But plenty of other businesses use Uber Eats and other gig worker couriers.
There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle on couriers. No one is paying $70,000/year (what their salary would be if they win the labour dispute) postal workers for delivering parcels.
Not really an option. Thanks to the insane cost of living and the federal government allowing Amazon to undercut Canadian business a lot of people can literally not afford to buy from anywhere else.
This shit needs to be addressed at the federal level.
Mail services are, in my opinion, a worthwhile endeavour. People in remote parts of the country deserve to be able to get their bills on paper too.
It’s when they’re considered to be a standalone, for-profit corporation that problems really crop up. Especially when they’re competing with and for Amazon’s race to the bottom delivery rates.
I say this as someone who resolutely avoids electronic billing. It’s a FANTASTIC way for my ADHD brain to forget about bills until the power is cut off.
ETA Germany sold off Deutsche Post but that’s a terrible example because Germany doesn’t have 90% of its population on 10% of the land mass and still need to serve that 10% population.
I don’t think Canada post needs to be profitable, I agree that it’s a service and should be run like one rather than a business.
But just because it’s a government run service doesn’t mean we need to toss money away either. If problems have been identified and they can be more efficient, why not?
I don’t see why mail needs to be delivered every single day, especially if it’s only junkmail that day.
I don’t see why door to door delivery is necessary either now a days. I lived in an area where I had to drive 20 minutes to pick up my mail, I survived. Maybe there’s a scenario I’m missing that my life experience hasn’t exposed me to yet, but if there are cases like that, maybe disabled people, let them apply for door to door delivery on a special case by case basis.
I agree with all those points. Door to door mail delivery was a postwar job creation program in USA as far as I know, maybe it’s the same for Canada, but it is a luxury unless it’s super high density.
I have a recycling bin next to my mailbox. Almost everything goes in there. I can check it once a week.
It might make sense to continue it as a service but attach a substantial surcharge to cover the pay of the mail carriers, just like you would normally pay extra for other luxuries. We might even set the price to subsidize the service for mobility-impaired people for whom going to a community mailbox is a genuine obstacle.
It is a luxury, but I don’t think we’re wrong to want luxuries. I think the frequency issue is intentionally disregarded. And it shouldn’t be. I’d rather have weekly delivery to my door than daily to a community mailbox. But what I’d really like is choice. What if we had both a community mailbox and weekly door-to-door delivery? Need something urgently, pick it up at the community mailbox where it gets dropped off daily, but if you’re not religiously emptying your community mailbox, a postman still comes by once a week to deliver any mail from your community mailbox to your home?
I suspect this could potentially save a lot of money AND provide actually better service to the significant majority of people. To the point that we could even start expanding door-to-door delivery again instead of removing it, we’d just expand it to areas that currently only have community mailboxes but do it on a reduced frequency, like garbage and recycling services. If they can do it weekly in most places, why can’t the postal service?
Most people don’t even get door to door delivery it is a luxury for a small percentage of people. Why does a small percentage get special treatment? Because they have always had it? That’s not a valid reason.
Not to mention the people who have it are generally wealthier because it’s mostly for detached homes at this point.
Did you miss the part where I suggested expanding it? You know, being progressive instead of regressive? Instead of taking away the luxury, let’s find a way to give more people the luxury? So that it’s not special treatment, it’s everyone’s treatment?
The postal workers would absolutely reject a plan for weekly door to door delivery because it would mean laying off tons of postal workers.
And how do you even make that work financially? Door to door delivery is insanely expensive, especially in rural areas. That means driving many km from farm to farm to deliver all the mail instead of just taking it to the town post office.
How is it possible to both lay off a ton of postal workers but be even less financially viable? It’s the per-letter costs. Door to door raises the per-letter costs and weekly delivery reduces the volume (because businesses who need daily delivery go elsewhere) and so you lay off a ton of postal workers but your volume falls off a cliff and you still lose money.
People who live in the country are already vehicle dependent anyway (no one’s living in the country ordering Uber Eats every day and paying a fortune on long distance delivery fees). It doesn’t hurt them to drive to the post office once a week (or even once a month) to get their mail.
Mail services are, in my opinion, a worthwhile endeavour. People in remote parts of the country deserve to be able to get their bills on paper too.
I really liked the idea I saw in some interview where Mail Services could be switched up to being ‘Federal Services’ or Community Services…
We have all these buildings,
Why can’t they be Passport Services, Taxes Services,… I even liked the idea that Mail Carriers could be wellness checkers.
Need something notarized? Need to do a proof of identity? Photo taken, Etc. Pay them well, Train them well, Make them more than just dropping of a letter. Expand them to be more than that.
Keep the hard earned infrastructure, and adapt it.
I don’t really agree that you have the right to paper bills. It’s a waste all around and should be subject to additional fees. We live in a digital age, time to adapt.
I do think that remote areas deserve to receive mail for other purposes, but bills aren’t one of those.
I understand why you say it’s an environmental waste, and that has some merit, until we consider the impact of junk mail, flyers, etc. There are many areas of modern society we can economize and improve upon before we get to the impact from paper billing.
What is your alternative to a pile of paper on a desk? It needs to be persistent, timely, and reliable. Online billing portals mean I need to log in on a regular basis to multiple portals in order to check for notifications and invoices, which simply doesn’t work for my brain. Having a bill sitting out, on which I am able to write the payment amount and date, permits me to keep track of the bill throughout its lifecycle at a glance from across the room.
Junk mail is one of the only things keeping Canada Post afloat. Get rid of it and you cut off a huge source of their revenue. And without it you’d have postal workers driving around with empty trucks delivering nothing at all most days.
I personally can go weeks between receiving actual envelopes addressed to me. Everything else is junk mail. Why should postal workers be paid $70k/year for this?
An email inbox? What online billing doesnt have the option for an email notification?
Can your bills not just be direct debit?
They may want to actually review the bills for errors before they pay them.
You can still review it prior to it going through.
Same problem as paying the bill online in the first place: you have to remember to take an unprompted action at a certain time.
Set a reminder? My phone is full of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reminders. I use my calendar as well for all kinds of events. I have repeated reminders and repeating alarms too. If you’re an older person (or just don’t like/trust technology, and I respect that) then you can use a paper calendar, daily planner, or a notebook.
But the argument that you need taxpayers to pay $70,000 a year salaries for postal workers to deliver bills to your front door because you would otherwise forget to pay your bills is an incredibly weak one.
All my paperless bills come to one of my email addresses, I look at it and then delete it. I have yet to see an error. I make sure that the money comes out of my account when it is supposed to.
You heard it here first folks. The people who don’t have internet, don’t need to pay for bills.
Sell public-option banking and cell phone services at post office branches and you’d turn instant profit. Bigger branches could also carry dry grocery goods. There is so much more they could be doing other than trying to out-Bezos the mail.
No you wouldn’t. Those are competitive industries, despite all the griping about Canadian banks and Rogers et al. Unless you’re going to turn Canada Post into a bank (and discontinue delivering mail) they’re not going to be viable just because you add banking service.
65% of Canada Post’s costs are the salaries of postal workers. Letter volume has dropped from 5.5 billion to less than 2 billion over the past 2 decades. Since the strike began, plans are in motion for many businesses that send a lot of mail to switch to electronic. Plenty of businesses that send out millions of letters per year are using the strike as a kick in the butt to switch to electronic. When the strike ends the volume won’t even come close to getting back to 2 billion.
Yes and yes.
I’ve been mentioning France’s efforts to modernise their postal services, that also includes services aimed at helping older folks with daily/weekly interactions / home visits, and I think that would be a great thing to add to Canada Post rural offerings.Public option cell and Internet I’d be very down with, especially if they reclaimed the lines they paid bell and Rogers to lay
Any solutions as to how NOT to lose $1,000,000 per day?
Didn’t think so. Let’s keep delvering junk mail door-to-door!How much money is the military losing per day? As far as I can tell they aren’t bringing in any income at all!
Without the military what’s stopping Trump from invading?
I don’t think government services need to turn a profit to exist. Including the military.
The military isn’t a public service. It’s the fundamental exercise of the government’s sovereignty over the country.
Canada Post doesn’t need to turn a profit either. But it shouldn’t be losing billions of dollars to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week when it could deliver weekly to community mailboxes (supplemented by home delivery for those in need) and provide the same vital service at a fraction of the cost.
Defence is absolutely a service the government is providing the country. Define it however you will, that is the nature of the thing.
As for the rest, everyone keeps banging on about junk mail but I seem to get other things in the mail regularly as well.
Call defence a service if you want. The point is that it doesn’t vary with supply and demand. The government decides how much it wants to spend on defence and that’s the budget.
Mail is different. If everyone sent 10x as much mail as we do now there wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we live in. Mail is in steep decline from 5.5 billion letters 2 decades ago to 2 billion today and dropping. Most of that mail is sent by businesses who are increasingly looking for ways to further cut it back.
The company I work for spends millions of dollars a year sending out mail, much of it to customers who have opted out of receiving mail but get it anyway because of legacy databases and slow-moving business decisions. The postal strike has a lot of managers now prioritizing the rectification of that issue. We’re going to see a huge drop in outgoing mail volumes and that will directly hit Canada Post’s bottom line.
Maybe they can deliver the junk mail!
The junk mail is one of the profits for Canada post, I personally put a sticky in my mailbox saying no junk mail. I have done a lot to avoid ads, it has not been inexpensive I have paid a lot of money to set up a system where I get very few peaces of junk mail, spam, or auto phone calls. Even though if you asked me I would have to tell you I have paid somewhere in the high hundreds (maybe $1000+) over the past ten or so years and I continue to pay lots of money (less now that I have started the buy Canadian thing) to keep me away from all the junk mail and spam the results have been priceless, Canada Post could help people with this.
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Charge $5/month for each address to not deliver any junk mail.
Paying them not to work, while paying them to work!
Circular and perpetual!
In an unhelpful, though unfortunately lawful, end-run around the union, the Liberals had granted Canada Post’s request to put a “final offer” directly to members in May. To no one’s surprise, nearly 70 per cent of voting postal workers rejected the proposed contracts. With the government again putting its thumb on the scale for Canada Post management in last Thursday’s announcement, the union had little choice but to escalate to full job action now.
For nearly two years, Canada Post management has been pushing a narrative that the crown corporation is broke and the only solution is to impose the costs of restructuring on workers.If i have to travel to get my mail, i’ll probably never see my mail.
So you have to walk 5 minutes or drive by it on your way to or from someplace and you’ll never pick it up? I mean I only maybe once a month unless I’m expecting something. Don’t see what the big issue is.
But hey I didn’t even know home delivery was a thing till the last strike.
I don’t see why we can’t designate door-to-door mailing in sparsely populated areas and community mailboxes in more crowded places? Wouldn’t that save quite some money while still ensuring that people don’t have to spend ridiculous amounts of time to get their mail? I’d imagine that in more crowded places, because things are a bit more down in scale, people wouldn’t have to drive 20 minutes just to get their mail, and it would generally be a 5 minute walk.
We can do something more creative too. If there’s a nearby cafe or something, make that the community mailbox and people can grab their mail and have coffee. Your parcels would be away from the elements, and the cafe can become sort of a 3rd place. It’s more efficient land use!
We can also make community mailboxes have the ability to notify the people whenever there’s something in the mail, and people can subscribe to that system if they wish to (not everyone wants or can use digital ways of getting information). That way, it’s more difficult for people to forget about their mail. There definitely is a development cost and ongoing maintenance cost, but hey, it’s an option.
For those in sparsely populated areas, nothing much would change, if any. I think they could still have community mailboxes and just opt into it if it fits their lifestyle (eg, they choose to head out to the mailbox every Tues and Fri, for example). They can change their delivery option by going online or just visit a library or somewhere they can get a person to help them change their setting.
Is that a bit more work for postal workers to have to separate mail? It could be, but perhaps we could append some kind of token to the address to clearly distinguish door-to-door vs community mailboxes, making it easier to verify by eye, and also easier to automatically separate via a scanner if needed. Heck, could we just plaster a QR code to mail?
For those who changed their option, you might still get mail either in your community mailbox or your own mailbox, depending on what you’ve switched to.
Just spitballing here. There’s a lot you can argue about each idea, but there are many things we can do to be more efficient, make it less painful for our postal workers but also save out on cost.
I grew up in Cambridge Ontario, we had community mailboxes there since the 80s. It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto in my 20s that I discovered Canada Post does door to door mail delivery.
I mean there was no need to notify anyone. you just checked the mailbox every day. If you had a package there was a key in your regular mailbox that would open the larger boxes at the bottom. then you’d just throw the key in the mailslot at the top of the community mailbox.
I always assumed this was a thing.
