this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025

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What’s the Way Forward for Canada Post? (thetyee.ca)

submitted 3 days ago by Sunshine@piefed.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're not getting paid to move a gift. USPS is.

Food delivery is a good point though, the perishablility of the package might have exceptions. Most food delivery needs to be delivered within an hour, and the majority is delivered within 20 minutes. Such deliveries are also super local, rarely if ever going farther than 60km. You could say food deliveries of under 50km are exempt, which would probably have some strange outliers, but I don't think every package is going to get sent with free fries to circumvent this.

At the other end, enforcing better working conditions and possibly unions would go a long way, but good luck finding a politician in power willing to do that.

Perhaps a bit more flexible would be a tax on parcels, and Canada Post has no change beyond that.

At the end of the day, the focus on costs is the issue. The service Canada Post provides is mail access to nearly everyone. Private services will pick up the profitable routes, but they won't cover nearly as many as Canada Post. If we shut down a service because the profitable routes have been taken by private services, people loose service and more people become dependent on private services.

Maybe the answer is to make Canada Post a charter agency, setting up infrastructure only where used, but required to cover any route requested. That might appease the corner cutters, but would maintain service to the people who need it. On the other hand, I don't want to ceede any distance to deregulators, lest they use that as precedent to dismantle other services and the few remaining crown corps.

That's really the larger issue. Arguing that services aren't profitable in order to dismantle them in favour of private corporations. Our city does this with our busses all the time. Public transportation gets better the more of it you have, but people argue that it doesn't make enough money so we should reduce service. What is a service worth? Why should we expect them to be profitable?

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think what you’re missing is that even if you had completely free, taxpayer-funded mail delivery you’d have corporations profiting off it: the corporations sending the mail.

Corporations send by far the majority of mail. In my job, I personally, have sent over 100,000 pieces of mail in a single week. Most of that mail gets sent to other businesses, not individual people. Why should taxpayers be subsidizing that?

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because a centralized universal solution is more efficient. Why should healthy people subsidize the sick? Why should drivers subsidize busses? Why should pedestrians subsidize highways? Why should people with solar panels subsidize power plants? Why have public services at all?

You could argue that businesses should pay more, but the fact that a service is useful is not an argument to shut it down.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Efficient? Not at all. The Canada Post situation is like those public transit systems that pay for a bunch of empty buses to drive around. Except no one needs mail delivery 5 days a week in order to hold down a job, while at least the empty buses are available for people to get to work or school or to doctor’s appointments.

Canada Post drivers drive the same route every day whether they have 1 letter to deliver or 1000. The reason they started delivering so much junk mail is because they’d otherwise be driving around with a bunch of empty trucks.

Private couriers don’t always do this. They make new routes based on the packages they have to deliver each morning. This is far more efficient than driving the same route every day. The difference is that you don’t have regular, predictable routes for 9-5 drivers to work every day. But this is an area where you get more efficiency out of not having guaranteed jobs.

Other private couriers may instead have fixed daily routes but they’re not the ones Canada Post has. Stuff like business-only routes where a courier will visit all the dentist’s offices, optometrists, doctor’s offices in an area. Another one may serve all the lawyers and their business clients in an area. Or all the architects and engineering firms and construction companies.

Canada Post can’t compete with these couriers because they can’t hire a set of drivers for every possible combination of specialized routes. Plus they don’t have the specialized knowledge that these businesses need. Things like specialized pickup and delivery times that fit around their daily schedule.

A single, centralized solution is really a “one-size fits all” that ends up being far less efficient and far more restrictive. It struggles to compete with myriad smaller businesses because it lacks a way to build and preserve institutional knowledge and specialized experience. It also lacks any incentive to innovate due to a lack of competition.

If Canada Post were truly the most efficient solution then it wouldn’t need a government-enforced legal monopoly to protect it from competition for letter mail. The reason it’s been struggling is that letter mail is dying and only parcel mail (which isn’t protected by the monopoly law) is still growing.

That’s ultimately what this is about. I don’t think anyone on here would argue that we should still be running Morse code telegraph services for people to communicate. It’s obsolete technology that no one wants to use anymore. Letter mail is heading exactly the same way.

I think it’s fair that businesses should be made to pay the true cost of delivering letter mail, but that will ultimately accelerate the decline as businesses look to cut down the amount of mail they send, up to and including passing on the cost of postage to customers who won’t opt-in to paperless communications.