The posties walked out Nov. 15 – just in time for the Christmas rush. Yet not only is there no sign of a settlement, but no legislation, either. And no one much seems to care. Canada Post employees and supporters rally at headquarters in Ottawa, on Nov. 28.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Oh, by the way, there’s a postal strike on. You may have missed it: it’s only been four weeks.
Postal strikes used to be big news. When the Canadian Union of Postal Workers first went on strike (illegally) in 1965, and again in 1968, and in 1970, and in 1974, 1975, 1978, 1981, 1987, and 1991, a strike at the post office could still cripple the country’s economy.
Even as late as the 1997 lockout, or the 2011 and 2018 strikes, Canada Post was still regarded as something of an essential service – which is why every major work stoppage since 1987 has ended in back-to-work legislation.
But this time? The posties walked out Nov. 15 – just in time for the Christmas rush. Yet not only is there no sign of a settlement, but no legislation, either. And no one much seems to care.
Oh sure, people have had to make other arrangements. Private couriers have been swamped. Small businesses have lost sales. But nothing like the kind of national crisis a postal strike used to entail.
The statistics tell the story. Canada Post provides two kinds of services: parcel delivery and letter mail. Letter mail used to be the bulk of its business, but has been declining sharply over the last two decades – from 5.5 billion pieces annually in 2006 to just 2.2 billion in 2023 – and now comprises less than a quarter of its revenues.
Parcel mail was supposed to take up the slack. And indeed, parcel volumes have increased rapidly in recent years, more than doubling between 2012 and 2019 as online purchases soared. Alas, the pandemic, while it drove Canada Post’s traffic to new highs, also attracted a slew of new and nimble competitors, some of whom even work weekends.
Canada Post’s share of the parcel market has accordingly been cut in half, from nearly two-thirds before the pandemic to less than 30 per cent today. The strike can only accelerate that: having shifted their business to other carriers, a lot of customers will not be coming back.
At least they have the option. Letter-mail customers do not, thanks to the statutory monopoly Canada Post enjoys over first-class mail. Anyone else who attempts to carry a letter in this country, and who does not charge at least three times the prevailing postage rate, is guilty of an offence under Sect. 14 (1) of the Canada Post Corporation Act, punishable by up to five years in jail.
Canada Post has responded to this “exclusive privilege” in the way of all monopolists: by raising rates and reducing service. Since 1981, the price of a stamp – $1.44, as of next month – has increased by more than three times the rate of inflation. Letters are now delivered less frequently (yes, the post office used to deliver on weekends), at a slower pace (Canada Post defines a letter as “on-time” if it takes two business days to cross town – four, to travel all the way to the next province) than ever before.
Indeed, across much of the country, the post office no longer delivers the mail to your door at all, but rather dumps it at a “community mailbox” somewhere in your alleged vicinity; barely a third of Canadian households still qualify for home delivery. Strange but true: Canada Post is guaranteed a monopoly on a service it increasingly refuses to provide.
The question is why this should be allowed to continue: e-mail may have largely taken over from paper, but 2.2 billion letters is still a lot of mail. The reason, supposedly, is that, unless the monopoly were preserved, private couriers would “cream off” the profitable urban routes, leaving Canada Post to deliver to the unprofitable rural routes.
But that only applies under the current system of uniform pricing: a stamp always costs the same, across town or across the country. There is no good reason for this policy – lots of things cost less in rural areas – especially when it serves as the linchpin of a costly and decrepit monopoly.
And yet, whenever reform of Canada Post comes up, the answers proposed never seem to be about opening the monopoly to competition, as countries from New Zealand to Sweden have done, and always seem to involve further cuts in service. Maybe to three days a week? Or census metropolitan area mailboxes?
Faced with Canada Post’s mounting deficits – six years in a row, including $748-million last year – it’s understandable that federal politicians would be looking to cut their losses. But the point of a mail service is to get letters from A to B as quickly and cheaply as possible, not to give CUPW members something to do. If Canada Post can’t, or won’t, do the job, let someone else give it a try.