A Canada Post mail carrier delivers a package on their route in Montreal, in 2024.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Canada Post, by its own analysis, is on the brink of insolvency. Revenue has been falling, and losses have been piling up at an astonishing rate. The Crown corporation needed an emergency bailout from the federal government just to keep the lights on.
The leadership of Canada Post took a look at that situation and thought: We should pay out millions of dollars in performance bonuses, $30.8-million in 2025, to be precise (a disclosure to a House of Commons committee that was made public by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation).
The post office defends the payouts in several ways. They aren’t bonuses, but “at risk” pay, a distinction without any difference. Whatever the term, the payments are not part of base salary.
The payouts don’t come from the government’s bailout fund, Canada Post says, but from its own revenues. Again, that’s a distinction without meaning. If the Crown corporation had not paid out $30.8-million, it would a correspondingly smaller need to borrow from the federal government. The company further notes that the payouts equate to less than 1 per cent of its total labour expenses.
The company also takes note of cost cutting measures that managers have had to swallow: defined-benefit pensions have been eliminated for new management employees since 2010, salary bands have been frozen through legislation since 2013, and there have been layoffs. The payouts are needed to retain the managers who remain, Canada Post says, even though it plans to continue to shed management jobs.
In fairness, a number of the Crown corporation’s changes are far more aggressive than anything that has been asked of the core public service, most notably the move to defined-contribution pensions, now accounting for 65 per cent of management employees.
A Canada Post office is seen in Calgary, in 2025.Amir Salehi/The Globe and Mail
And there is one rationale that Canada Post could, but did not offer: Until far too late in the day, the federal Liberal government refused to give senior management the latitude needed to shake up its operations. There is no better example than the Trudeau government’s misbegotten insistence on freezing in place home delivery services rather than moving to community-based mailboxes.
Canada Post starts work to end most door-to-door mail delivery
Still, Canada Post’s justifications fail to take into account the optics of paying out millions of dollars in bonuses in the midst of a corporate-turnaround effort that will demand big changes from the, um, somewhat intransigent unionized postal workers. And they also fall short of the mark on transparency, not to mention leadership.
On June 1, Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers finally agreed to a new contract, ending two years of on-again off-again labour disruptions. That seems likely to be not much more than a pause for CUPW to catch its breath, given the June 1 message from CUPW president Jan Simpson, who had urged that the deal be rejected. “To win the fights ahead, prepare for the next round of bargaining and mobilize against the government’s attacks on our public postal service, we all have to regroup and unite in our struggle.”
Canada Post’s board and executives have handed Ms. Simpson a hefty cudgel for those “fights ahead.” The anti-management taglines pretty much write themselves.
If the payouts were necessary and justified (a rather big if), Canada Post could have bolstered that case through greater transparency. The CEO’s salary range and potential payout is publicly available, for instance, but not the actual amounts.
The little concrete information available needed to be extracted through a Parliamentary committee, and there is scant detail. What were the bonuses paid to top executives versus rank and file managers? What was the split between the floundering post office operations and the profitable Purolator courier business? The public has no idea. (The contrast with the detailed disclosures by private-sector corporations with publicly traded stocks is striking.)
And on what were the triggers for the payments? Again, Canada Post won’t say. Presumably the KPIs didn’t include “not heading for bankruptcy.” Canadians, who are floating a huge loan to Canada Post, deserve that information.
Perhaps with such transparency, there would be a case to be made that non-executive managers should have received payouts. But what about the executive team? Surely that group, along with the board, should have had the leadership chops to recognize the reputational risk of not forgoing their at-risk payments.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Employees agreed to a new contract. The name of the union is the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.