Canada Post and its shrinking future

Opinion

Some Canadians will no doubt think the latest contract dispute between Canada Post and its 55,000 unionized workers will bring the end of home mail delivery. In fact, the truth is a bit more complicated.

It’s hard not to link the strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers with a future gutting of Canada Post operations.

The union says it walked off the job precisely because the federal Liberal government announced plans two weeks ago to eliminate door-to-door mail delivery and trim thousands of jobs from the national mail service.

In reality, this latest strike did not trigger the seismic changes coming to Canada Post. It did, however, create an opportunity for Ottawa to hasten those changes. How else to explain Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound’s decision to announce a sweeping downsizing of Canada Post in the middle of a labour dispute?

Canada Post and its union have been locked in a contract stalemate for much of the last year. Last November, union workers walked off the job after rejecting a contract offer. Ottawa forced them back to work in mid-December, but that did not convince the two sides to reach a settlement.

Lightbound announced on Sept. 23 he was going to essentially start implementing the recommendations of the Industrial Inquiry Commission’s report on Canada Post. In a blueprint for a sweeping overhaul delivered this past June, the commission recommended an end to door-to-door mail delivery for the four million homes that still receive it and slower delivery times for most mail.

You might ask yourself why a minister of the Crown would effectively intervene in contract talks between Canada Post and its employees by announcing, regardless of the outcome of those talks, the mail service was destined to become a shell of itself?

Some will see this as an undermining of collective bargaining. Others will see it as a reality check for both sides, a taste of the very future of Canada Post that is coming whether the union and employer want it to come.

The sad reality is that Canada Post has lost money every year since 2017; this year, it expects to lose as much as $1 billion. Although some of those losses are due to on-again, off-again strikes and lockouts, the fact is that Canada Post’s foundational business plan no longer works.

Postal services around the world are under siege as volumes drop and costs of moving mail have increased astronomically. Denmark’s 400-year-old postal service, which has seen a 90 per cent drop in mail volume, will abandon daily door-to-door mail delivery by the end of this year. It will likely not be the last.

Canada Post is suffering under the very same trend. In 2006, the highest volume year for Canada Post, it handled 5.5 billion pieces of mail; by 2023, and despite a rapidly growing population, that volume had dropped to 2.2 billion.

The reasons for that drop are obvious: email and social media replacing letters and cards; paperless billing being substituted for the monthly envelope; the broad array of private courier options available for packages.

While the union seems to be somewhat oblivious to these downward trends, Canada Post has shown hints of acknowledgment. Last week, with a full-scale strike paralyzing mail operations, Canada Post announced it was pulling a signing bonus off the table.

The mail service had offered, as is the tradition in past negotiations, a signing bonus of between $500 and $1,000 per employee. The benefit is negligible, but signing bonuses represent a moral victory for the union and do go some way to convincing a bargaining group to ratify a contract offer.

Again, why pull an inducement off the table at a critical stage of negotiations? Canada Post has clearly woken up and smelled the attrition that is to come. The union, not so much.

Underlying the Liberal government’s plans to downsize Canada Post is the confidence the public is unlikely to rise up in arms to defend the Crown mail service.

Thanks to the adoption of paperless options for the essential correspondence of our lives, and frequent labour disruptions, we’re less reliant on Canada Post than ever before. Even small businesses, which form a backbone of Canada Post’s courier service, are slowly migrating to other options.

A July survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business found that four in five small businesses still use Canada Post, but only one in five of those believed “Canada Post is critical to their operations.”

As for the general public, an Angus Reid poll this past summer found nearly three-quarters of Canadians would support reducing mail service to three days a week, while two-thirds would accept a reduction in door-to-door delivery.

Taken together, it’s not hard to see how the future will see less Canada Post. That has become an inescapable reality that no amount of contract talks will change.

» Dan Lett is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist.