If you believe Canada Post should be terminated or privatized you might consider the following.
- Canada Post is mandated by the Federal Government to serve every address in Canada. Private companies are not. Because of this mandate the Crown Corporation has always been seen as a public service. The USPS and all EU postal services are similarly mandated.
- Canada Post was reorganized by the Liberal government in 1981 as a Crown Corporation and must, by Federal law, stand profitably on its own. The legislation mandates service to all Canadians and a monopoly on letter mail. Canada Post receives NO tax payer money in subsidies; unlike most Crown Corporations it exists on profits alone. It can, if necessary, apply for up to 500 million dollars in Federal repayable loan financing; it first did in January, 2025.
- The monopoly on letter mail generated enough money to keep the Corporation afloat for the first couple of decades. Remember ‘stamps’? But when e-mail decimated letter post and couriers siphoned off much parcel post, our government did nothing to help Canada Post maintain the universal mandate; private companies were free to cherry pick profitable Canada Post delivery areas.
- Canada Post is losing money. When you are competing against private delivery services who pick and choose profitable communities to serve and you are by law forced to service hundreds of small, unprofitable communities how could you make money other than charging outrageous fees?
- Canada Post costs too much. CBC has interviewed a dozen or so small business owners who all have the same complaint: without Canada Post their delivery costs have shot up and eaten into their profits.
- Canada Post collective bargaining. Who is really responsible for the lack of agreement after well over a year of bargaining? Is it the Union who has no power to compel an agreement? Or is it the management who knows full well that they just have to wait out the Union until the government forces them back to work?
- Canada Post delivery on Hornby. Where are our daily private delivery trucks? Could it be that we, along with the 20% of rural Canadians are deemed unprofitable by private delivery services? Yes, I am aware that private delivery vehicles have been coming occasionally to Hornby over the past year or two but I wager the Post Office still handles the bulk of parcel deliveries. We do know that private companies offload a lot of parcels onto Canada Post when they reach a major centre such as Nanaimo.
And now the union has rejected management’s last offer leaving us once again with a Canada Post in limbo. Of course all the vocal free market privateers are calling for privatization of the service perhaps not realizing that it has been operating as a private corporation since 1981 while having its hands and feet tied by Federal legislation. Even free enterprise voices from the U.S. are suggesting privatization as the only possible way to fix the problems while at the same time their own USPS operates under similar legal restraints.
To address this problem our Federal Government has some options:
- They could mandate that all delivery companies, private or public, must service the entire nation. This would level the playing field. We would soon find out how willing Fedex, UPS, DHL (owned by the German Post Office!) and the rest of the private delivery world are interested in servicing the 20% of non-profitable rural Canada. They might close up shop and disappear leaving Canada Post alone.
- The Federal government could accept that mail and parcel delivery is, as it has been for over a century, a public service and give up on the neo-conservative nonsense of making government services profit centres on the private model.
- They could privatize the service.
The first solution is unlikely.
The second is workable as we know that public services can be quite efficient: most Canadians get their power from Crown Corporations at relatively low rates compared to rest of the world; most of us got a decent education from public schools because private ones were expensive and uninterested in students who couldn’t pay; and that by all measures countries with national health services have better outcomes for all citizens than the one country that doesn’t. Canada Post should not have to stand on its own and turn a profit as long as it is universally mandated to service all citizens. The cost of a universal public service should be borne by all citizens.
The third solution pretty well guarantees that delivery charges for small rural communities will sky rocket if indeed private companies don’t choose to ignore them entirely. I once took a Fedex parcel to the Post Office to see what they would charge to ship it the same distance it had already come: Fedex $42; Canada Post $21. Amazon has given us a clear example of private interest; they have been refusing to deliver to the Hornby Post office even though Canada Post is still operating with no strike and only an overtime ban—a ban set off by management’s change of rules to allow cheaper part-time workers to perform overtime services.
At any rate the knot to be untied does not lie in the hands of either the workers or management; it lies with the Federal government who must either rescind universality or take it seriously and support the system with subsidies as it does in large part for education, health, and power. If we want universal services they must be supported by taxation. If we live in a culture that no longer wants any universality for agreed on services then we must be prepared for large sections of our citizenry to do without those services.
