By Ray Rivers
October 2nd, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
The timing couldn’t be worse. Canada’s economy is struggling, showing signs of stagnation, rising unemployment and a decline in per-capita GDP (productivity). This was Mr. Trump’s plan after all – destroy Canada’s economy and we will beg to become the 51st state. The last thing we needed was another postal strike.
Postal workers – waving goodbye to the decent jobs they had?
We shouldn’t be blaming Mr. Trump for the mess in our postal service. Mr. Trudeau won his 2018 election promising to preserve the money-losing door-to-door delivery service. And then, perhaps because of all the strike threats, the post office corporate management lost much of their lucrative parcel business. They went from holding over 60% to less than 25% of the parcel market in just the last five years. That’s no way to run a business unless you want to bankrupt it.
Email has made snail mail delivery something of an anachronism. I had been hired by the post office in the mid-1970s as their senior economist and stayed long enough to help ease in the new crown corporation of the 80’s. That allowed enough political leverage to end the stream of deficits back then by jacking up the price of postage – something which wouldn’t work today.
The post office has played a crucial role in this country’s development since its beginning. It is vital for remote communities where alternate means of communication are limited. Perhaps that is where the post office’s real future lies? After all, it’s been really lousy competing with the private sector. Still there are all those group mail boxes, the street mail drop-off boxes and all those postal stations.
Canada Post currently delivers mail over the largest geographic area in the world, including Russia. So it is not going to disappear. It’s not the pony express – where riders relayed, swapping horses along the way, as they carried mail between Missouri and California to honour their 10 day delivery guarantee. That early private sector mail experiment lasted fewer than two years.
Every country road has scenes like this. They could all be gone in less than three years.
There are about 70,000 full and part time employees in the corporation which serves over 3 million rural customers with residential mail delivery. Regardless of the current strike’s outcome, thousands of existing employees will end up on the jobless rolls.
Even if those lay-offs are phased-in, the pain of finding oneself jobless in a growing jobless market today is problematic. We should have seen this coming.
Mr. Carney has his work cut out for him.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
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Firstly, I am a serious lifetime philatelic collector of Canadian postage stamps. I stopped adding new items twenty years ago as the material became a voluntary government subsidy, much like beer, spirits, lottery tickets and weed when the nation embraced a drug culture in 2015.
Dad considered these all taxes on the stupid.
However, I will offer to prepare pro bono the Request for Proposal for prequalified organizations to outsource the services in their entirety.
I work at a postal outlet. We are still open, as we are employed by Shoppers. Now I’m doing merchandizing jobs (stacking shelves). We are providing some services like MoneyGram. What is amazing to me, is the number of people that have no idea there is a strike. When we tell people with their parcels or letter mail in hand, that we are not accepting anything during the strike (except for pre-paid returns ), they look at you dumbfounded. What strike? And the next question every time without fail … “When will the strike be over?” Well that’s the million dollar question I answer. Who knows … weeks maybe but probably months. Canada Post wants to break the union and they will. The drivers I know do an excellent job and most don’t want to be on strike. I’ve watched our revenues decline 30% since the last strike action. Many of our regulars have gone to other shipping solutions. Others have just closed their business as it is no longer profitable shipping using couriers. The whole situation is so sad for the postal workers and Canadians.
I wonder what Mr. Rivers thinks of Mr. Joe Gaetan’s recent suggestions to keep the Post Office afloat?
I agree with Fred regarding daily delivery. I agree that it really is not necessary. But how will that work? Who would do these deliveries twice a week? As an aged senior, I’m not in favour of “community boxes”.
No one needs daily mail delivery. Twice per week is enough. Redirect those workers to parcels and reduce the workforce so that the post office stops losing money