Canada Post mailbox floating in swamp water.Sean Kilpatrick/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian.
The country prepared this past week for yet another Canada Post strike, and a recent report suggests the Crown corporation verges on insolvency. Regardless of how the current labour dispute is resolved, hard questions will have to be asked about the future of the post office in Canada.
Specifically, have the government and Canada Post’s management set it up to fail?
While most Canadians might assume the post office is a federally-funded public service, Canada Post is in fact supposed to operate on its own revenue. For much of the last 44 years it has done just that, and often returned billions to federal coffers.
Now, the underlying business of post and parcel delivery that allowed Canada Post to function without being dependent on government funding has obviously changed.
People stopped sending letters and started shopping online. And American e-commerce giants have affiliated delivery services, whose workers are often paid less and not unionized. Private U.S. shippers with massive international operations, such as UPS and FedEx, also entered the fray, wielding scale that Canada Post cannot match.
Yet there remains an expectation that Canada Post continue to operate as a vital, low-cost, national public service while competing with American giants.
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No amount of downsizing, streamlining or cost-cutting, as recommended by a recent industrial inquiry commission report, is going to make Canada Post competitive in that kind of environment. Furthermore, recommendations that Canada Post eliminate daily residential mail delivery, shutter post offices and further eliminate services isn’t going to help Canada Post gain any kind of competitive edge.
You can’t do more with less.
One potential alternative to current recommendations is that the federal government absorb Canada Post and run it like a public service, but this doesn’t address the problems caused by unfair competition. In this scenario, the government would invariably have to pursue a program of gradual elimination of jobs and services until Canada Post is finally shut down.
Managed failure, in other words.
A better way forward could be termed “structured and regulated expansion,” where Canada Post remains a profit-driven public corporation but is given a government-granted monopoly on most at-home parcel delivery services. There’s a precedent for this: Canada Post already has a monopoly over most letter mail. And before deregulation, Bell Canada was granted a similar government-approved monopoly on long-distance phone services.
Weekend work remains a big obstacle in negotiations between Canada Post and its workers, who have threatened to walk off the job May 23 in what would be their second strike in less than six months. The union has informed management that employees plan to hit the picket line starting Friday morning just after midnight, halting delivery of nearly 8.5 million letters and 1.1 million parcels per weekday.
The Canadian Press
If Prime Minister Mark Carney is genuine in his assertions that the special economic relationship between Canada and the United States is in fact over, and that the time has come for fresh new ways of thinking, might we not reconsider the wisdom of allowing so many large American corporations to undercut the essential service Canada Post provides?
If Canada Post is truly so vital to the economy that its employees can be forced back to work (as was the case last December), then why is the post office also treated like a business that’s supposed to compete with giant multinationals in a free and open market?
Canada Post can either be an indispensable national institution providing a vital public service or it can be privatized and eventually lose on the battlefield of free enterprise, but the present situation – in which the rights of their workers are abused and the public is forced to accept diminishing returns – is as untenable as it is unacceptable.
It is also worth noting just how divergent the competing visions for the future of Canada Post truly are. Management and the government, who want cost and service cuts, seem to think failure is a fait accompli, and that their only responsibility is to stanch the hemorrhaging of a dying corpse.
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Remarkably, it’s Canada Post’s workers who are coming up with all the innovative solutions – such as postal banking – and reimagining the post office as a sustainable community incubator.
In addition to a monopoly in parcel delivery, we might further consider a future in which post offices function as extensions of Service Canada, offer small-business support services, and/or sell and distribute Canadian print media like a newsstand.
Canada Post’s failure is not inevitable, but it often seems as though we’re being conditioned to accept defeat as the only possible outcome.
The Canadian public not only has a right to its post office but also an expectation government will do all it can to ensure Canada Post’s success and long-term viability. This cannot be accomplished with job losses and cutbacks.
Rather than accept defeat, the government needs to consider whether an unfair competitive environment has allowed foreign corporations to undermine and undercut Canada Post, leading both to its insolvency and (eventually) the de facto privatization of home-delivery services.