An opinion piece from the Globe and Mail..

23 May 2025 03:21:24 UTC

opinion

Canada Post workers could strike again. If they do, the public will see red Rita Trichur
Published May 20, 2025
Updated May 21, 2025

304 Comments

The first alert came from my bank. Then every other company
that sends me a monthly paper bill followed suit. Canada Post
workers could go on strike later in May, they warned. So, sign
up for e-statements instead because you're still on the hook
for paying on time. "We also recommend that you set up
preauthorized debits and payments to help avoid any
inconvenience with your payments during the service
disruption," my bank said. Call me old-fashioned, but I hate e-
bills and paying with plastic. But making the switch is
starting to seem logical now that Canada Post has received a
strike notice from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).
Canada Post workers could walk out at the stroke of midnight on
Friday just as their extended contract expires, continuing a
protracted labour dispute.

If you recall, postal workers were ordered back to work last
December after a strike that lasted 32 days and disrupted the
holiday shopping season. The memory of stranded holiday
presents and letters to Santa are still fresh in people's
minds. So, the prospect of yet another postal delivery
disruption is sure to irk Canadians from coast to coast to
coast. Mail delivery is an essential service, especially for
people who live in rural communities. But Canada Post is facing
a worsening financial crisis. As a result, mail service is
costing more but becoming less dependable.

For all those reasons, postal workers risk destroying the last
shred of the public's sympathy if they strike for the second
time in less than six months. Canada Post may have a monopoly
on mail delivery, but its finances are a mess and only expected
to get worse over the coming years. From 2018 to 2023, the
Crown corporation lost a whopping $3-billion on a pretax basis.
Plummeting mail volumes - 5.5 billion letters were delivered in
2006 versus 2.2 billion in 2023 - are one source of financial
pressure. So, too, is population growth, which results in
roughly new 200,000 addresses annually. There has also been a
marked shift from letter mail to parcels as more Canadians shop
online. But Canada Post is increasingly competing with private
delivery services that benefit from lower labour costs. As a
result, Canada Post's market share in the parcel delivery
market tumbled from 62 per cent prior to the COVID-19 pandemic
to 29 per cent in 2023. "Canada Post's financial situation is
unsustainable," states its 2023 annual report.

Accordingly, the federal government threw Canada Post a
financial lifeline this past January - a $1-billion-plus loan
of taxpayers' money.

In this softening economy, however, voters have little appetite
for throwing good money after bad and little patience for
public-sector unions that are oblivious to the fiscal realities
facing the federal government.

The CUPW needs to be realistic with its wage demands and
demonstrate flexibility about the use of part-time staff to
make weekend deliveries.

A recent report by the Industrial Inquiry Commission
recommended that part-time staff who work weekend shifts be
covered by the collective agreement, which is an entirely
sensible approach.

The report's other key recommendation, the phase-out of door-
to-door delivery, is likely inevitable, too, whether the union
admits it or not.

"Bargaining largely failed because one party - CUPW - is
defending business as usual, and wants to improve on the status
quo with, for example, further job security enhancements and
even better than best-in-class total compensation and terms and
conditions of employment," states the report.

That assessment is not going to land well with taxpayers,
especially since mail delivery has become less reliable in
recent years. While people in other countries enjoy Saturday
mail delivery, Canadians can't even count on their supermarket
flyers arriving before the start of sales.

Taxpayers have had enough. Canada Post is bleeding red. Instead
of being part of the solution, CUPW seems intent on forcing it
to go belly up.

Read or post comments (304)

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Canada Post workers could strike again. If they do, the public will see red

Mostly in recent years I have more and more gotten away from physical
mailings. A lot of my Bills and Banking info and such is online now,
often just done without my permission - if you give them an eMail
address they assume you can do banking online - but it can be handy.

Mostly just Government stuff is still mailed to me, tax stuff and
license renewals and such..

But the post office has been working hard to alienate customers for
a long time. Many years ago when I saw the cost of stamps increase
by about 400% over a couple of years, I reduced my annual mailings
from something like 60 letters to about 8. Now it's 2 or 3..
How much did they make on that?

And this was before you could do most things online so I was just
cutting down on mailings, not moving it to eMail which is a lot
easier to do these days.

Today Canada Post is basically bankrupt and only keeps running
because of thier semi-government corporation setup.

If they were a regular business they would do something like go
to 3 day a week delivery to community boxes - split the city in
two and deliver to each half the 'other' days so you have one
worker doing most of what 2 do today. There's an extra day in
there so maybe they need a part timer for one day a week.

Then they should concentrate on parcel delivery at a reasonable
price because that's where the money really is these days..

But this will never happen because their union is out of their
minds, wanting them to hire More people rather than laying some
off to save the business.

It makes me think about many years ago when I was working in
a grocery store chain and the union had cut the work week down
from 40 hours to 37 hours and was working on a new contract
demanding a 35 hour week, plus higher pay, more paid holidays
and other extras.

You could almost see them smiling and rubbing their hands together
looking for more things to ask for.

But grocery store chains are owned by People, not the government,
and they had watched their profits drop from about 1.5% to even
less so, when the smiling union guys walked into the negotiation
meeting, the company just said, no extras, no raises for 2 years,
and we are going back to a 40 hour work week.

The union laughed and said, well you can expect a long strike!

And the company people said no, that's not happening.. Sign the
contract or we are shutting down the entire chain of about 80
stores.

The union signed the contract.

You can probably tell I'm not a big fan of unions. I thought they
were great when I got my first raise in my first job, but over
the years I saw them do things I didn't much like. I was a hard
worker and 3 times the company gave me merit raises above what the
union contract called for, and that got me threatened by the union
for setting production records and making everyone else look bad..

Worse, others saw what I was doing and started working harder and
they were rewarded for it as well, and the last thing the unions
want is people being paid for what they actually do rather than for
just showing up for work most days.. The more work people do, the
fewer people you need to do it, and the fewer people there are to
pay union dues..

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