It is beginning to look more and more likely that Canada is going to have to do something about its postal service.
The seemingly intractable labour dispute between the Crown corporation and its unionized employees is bad enough, but hopefully some resolution will eventually be found.
However, it’s the increasingly sad state of the service’s finances that is signalling some sort of major overhaul in the future.
Canada Post recently reported a $1.3 billion loss in last year’s operating expenses. Even when accounting for the divestment of some of its businesses, the loss still totalled $841 million last year.
The corporation hasn’t made a profit since 2017 and says it has lost $3.8 billion since then.
A recent industrial inquiry commission into the state of the postal service was damning, declaring it “effectively insolvent.”
The commission made several recommendations, and most of them seem inevitable and probably the right thing to do.
These include ending door-to-day mail delivery and allowing Canada Post to change routes daily to reflect volumes and hire part-time employees to deliver parcels on the weekend and to help when needed during the week.
We would go one step further and suggest the Crown corporation should consider moving away from daily mail service to perhaps two or three times a week.
The near dominance of digital communication means most people no longer use “snail mail” for conducting business or keeping in touch with friends and family.
This, consequently, has turned on its head the old model of a postal service delivering letters to our doors or post office boxes five days a week.
This service is no longer as important as it once was, which is reflected in Canada Post’s dismal financial performance of recent years.
However, one recommendation is much less palatable — lifting the moratorium on rural post office closures.
While one could argue that all parts of the country — urban and rural — should face the impact of making major changes to Canada Post, it’s also important to recognize the vital role that post offices play in rural communities.
Rural families are no less affected by the rise of digital communication than those in the cities, but post offices in rural communities are about much more than just mail and parcel delivery.
These post offices are often a community’s meeting place, where residents maintain vital personal connections and avidly read the notices tacked onto the bulletin board.
More tangible are the services that Canada Post still provides in this modern digital age, such as delivering grain samples to the Canadian Grain Commission.
Eroding this vital service would be a step backward, and in fact would exacerbate the growing urban-rural divide that persists in this country.
There are no easy answers.
One would be to encourage the leadership at Canada Post to find better ways to operate in the new digital environment, but if they haven’t done so already, what are the chances they will suddenly discover a path forward?
Another solution is for the federal government to declare Canada Post an essential public service and pay whatever is needed to keep it operating, but the appetite for increased government spending may be waning.
What we can do is keep up the pressure on the federal government and make it clear that no matter what hard decisions it needs to make at Canada Post, lowering rural service on its priority list can’t be one of them.
