Canada Post workers during a nationwide strike to protest proposed changes to the postal service in Toronto on Oct. 1.Wa Lone/Reuters
David Moscrop is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
When Canada Post workers shifted last week from a national strike to rotating strikes, the union was acknowledging a hard truth. By adopting a more targeted approach, CUPW signalled that it was failing to draw significant public support, and that it wasn’t operating from a position of strength. However one might try to spin it, that’s a suboptimal turn when you’re trying to force an employer to reconsider their plans to overhaul your industry – and your place within it.
Canada Post workers are striking because of proposed federal changes that would end home mail delivery over the next decade, close post offices, and slash jobs. The Liberal government has referred to this by the bloodless euphemism “modernization,” justified by the $5-billion lost by the Crown corporation since 2018. There has been no talk from the government about reimagining Canada Post as a service – as with, say, the armed forces, who don’t make the country any money and, indeed, cost it plenty. There has been no conversation about meaningful innovation, nor any recognition that the national mail carrier subsidizes delivery for individuals and small businesses, bearing costs that would otherwise shift to a population already struggling to get by.
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Canada Post workers should be talking about all of this, loudly and often, because the postal union’s members are having problems making these issues connect with the public – and the government knows it. Polling from the Angus Reid Institute shows that while a majority of Canadians oppose privatizing Canada Post, most are open to structural reforms, including reduced mail delivery days and non-unionized temporary postal workers. And while 61 per cent say it’s worth $20 a year each to maintain a universal national post service, 51 per cent say Canada Post is either not that important or not important at all to them.
If the public had been clearly onside with postal workers, the union might have managed to find a more effective strategy. Now, it’s left to play a bad hand – and so far, it’s playing it poorly.
The recent strike by Air Canada flight attendants offers a study in contrasts. In that case, Canadians backed workers who, the union argued, were getting a raw deal because they are only paid for the hours during which the aircraft is moving. It helped, too, that no one likes airlines. Flight attendants rejected the wage offer from Air Canada, which included limited ground pay, knowing that the public was in their corner.
On the other hand, Canadians seem to like Canada Post and have mixed feelings about the future of mail delivery. What can labour do when they’re up against a somewhat unsympathetic public that’s open to reforming workers out of work? The Angus Reid survey offers a hint, in its finding that many respondents said they rely on Canada Post to deliver parcels ordered online, and that 72 per cent of them would back the corporation adopting new services, including postal banking and secure parcel lockers. The key word is service: Canada Post workers must make the case to the public and the government that they offer a service that can meet current and evolving needs.
During a moment of nationalist fervour and anxiety over the country’s sovereignty, it wouldn’t hurt to lean into the nation-building frame, either. The union ought to emphasize that Canada Post connects the country and has done so since before Confederation. It cannot be allowed to fail in the way a private carrier can. It can, however, charge the same amount to send a piece of mail to anywhere within the world’s second-largest country by land mass.
It is a fact, though, that Canadians aren’t sending as much mail as they once did: In its talk of modernizing Canada Post, the government cites a decline in volume from 5.5 billion letters a year two decades ago, to two billion now. No one can deny that we are seeing structural changes in mail delivery. Still, postal workers can make the case for preserving Canada Post as a service and for building out what’s on offer, emphasizing the essential role the corporation and its workers play in uniting (and subsidizing) the country, and the new roles the corporation could take up to replace, in whole or in part, the decline in letter mail.
That struggle may entail trade-offs, such as more community mailboxes rather than door-to-door delivery. But if workers can bargain for a shift from a declining service to a growth service, like postal banking or package lockers, then it might help secure the long-term viability of Canada Post and its workers – and, crucially, the public support essential to maintaining the enterprise.