Canada Post employees and supporters rally at Canada Post headquarters in Ottawa, Nov. 28.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Jon Peirce, an Ottawa writer, holds a master’s in industrial relations and spent 11 years working for a federal public-service union. He is the author of Canadian Industrial Relations.
Something weird and wonderful happened Monday in the Canada Post strike. The two sides met face-to-face for the first time in two weeks.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the meeting didn’t bring Canada Post and the union any closer to a settlement. Management’s response to the union’s latest set of proposals was to suggest that the “union’s intent appears to be to widen the gap in negotiations, rather than to close it.”
While perhaps disappointing, the management response did bring clarity to the situation. And perhaps that was what prompted Ottawa on Friday to direct the Canada Industrial Relations Board to send Canada Post employees back to work. Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon also extended the existing collective agreement until May 2025.
It was the right decision. But why didn’t Mr. MacKinnon do it weeks ago? If there was to be any hope at all of restoring postal service before Christmas, the government needed to step in. We were at the risk of a bleak holiday season all across Canada, and the government would have gone down in history as the Grinch that stole Christmas.
The imposition of back-to-work legislation is something no government can or should take lightly. At the same time, there are many reasons for regarding Canada Post as an essential business, particularly during November and December. It’s a nationwide service, and in many parts of the country, particularly in remote and northern areas, it’s the only mail and parcel service available. Even in less remote regions where alternative services are available, they come at a much higher cost – a cost high enough that many Canadians simply can’t afford to pay it. And Canada Post is of particular importance to small businesses and to the country’s charitable organizations, which rely heavily on it for soliciting and receiving funds.
The strike’s most serious effects have been on Indigenous and other remote communities in the country’s North. The strike left these communities quite literally stranded. As Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, told Power & Politics on Dec. 5, without Canada Post services, there was “no way of moving goods and services through our communities in a timely and expedient fashion.” There is no other parcel-delivery service available to these communities. The communities don’t have roads; without Canada Post, cheques from the southern part of the country cannot reach them. Those in need of certain types of food, diapers or even essential medications are simply out of luck.
To allow a labour dispute to continue to have such a devastating effect on the country’s Indigenous and northern communities would have been unconscionable.
Other serious effects include the cessation of delivery of at-home health screenings and government documents such as passports and licence renewals. Undue delay in transmission and processing of at-home health screenings could have the effect of making diseases detected through such screenings more serious than they would otherwise have been.
The effect on the country’s charities has also been severe. Toronto Zoo’s Wildlife Conservancy was among many organizations feeling the pinch, with donations reported to have been about 40-per-cent lower than at the same time last year. In B.C., the Vancouver General Hospital and UBC Hospital Foundation says its annual Millionaire Lottery has seen a drop in ticket sales since the charity relies on mail campaigns to get its message out.
Then there’s the effect on the country’s small businesses, many of which do the bulk of their business in the two months before Christmas. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says about 80 per cent of the country’s small businesses use Canada Post. Because of the strike, with higher costs resulting from having to switch to costlier alternate deliverers, as well as outright loss of business, small businesses were losing upward of $76-million each day the strike continued.
Moreover, alternative couriers such as Purolator and UPS that have moved in to fill the void left by Canada Post were themselves being strained almost to the breaking point. The increased volume of parcels being sent via these services caused pile-ups of parcels in their warehouses and led some to limit the number of packages they accept at one time from couriers.
To put it bluntly, we were nearing the point of total system bottleneck, which, if continued much longer, might have made it impossible to get parcels or important documents through by any means.