Out on delivery. (CP — Christinne Muschi)
My grandfather was a village postmaster, and my mother had fond memories of working at the post office with him when she was a kid. My father was a stamp collector, and while this wasn’t a hobby I stuck with I did have stamp albums as a boy that I’ve held on to, along with the boxes filled with my father’s highly eclectic (and I’m afraid not very valuable) collection.
When it comes to my affection for all things mail related, however, what stands out the most is the fact that I lived on a farm most of my life and we received rural mail delivery. I was always impressed by the job these people did, even in bad weather on what were the worst of roads. Living in rural isolation, the arrival of the mail was an event that meant a lot to family and neighbours.
But times change. When I was young there were few courier companies and no Amazon delivery vans (much less drones). There was no Internet and email. There were no flyers or junk mail. People sent Christmas cards. In other words, everything came to you through the mail, and if it wasn’t always something you wanted it was at least something you knew was important.
This is no longer the case, which is why Canada Post, the Crown corporation that handles the mail in this country, is facing such a host of problems. Chief among these problems is their high labour costs and the fact that a lot of what made the mail not only useful but essential is gone. The result is a corporation that is, according to one recent study, bankrupt. Apparently they lost $300 million in just the first quarter of 2025. That’s not sustainable.
Last year the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) went on strike for a month before being ordered back to work in the hope of finding a solution somewhere down the road. That solution hasn’t materialized and as I write this another strike is expected.
I don’t think anyone on either side, workers or management, is under any illusions as to how grim the future is for Canada Post. That said, I do think the mail has a future. I don’t mind that such a valuable service is operating at a loss. I still think a country, especially one as big as Canada, needs a public, national mail system. What has to be faced though is that a dramatic restructuring of the mail, what it does and how it does it, is going to be required.
And when I say restructuring what I mean primarily is contraction. I probably get more mail than most people. But I don’t need daily mail delivery. If they even cut delivery back to once a week I think I’d be fine.
I don’t know how workable this is, but there have been various studies done and other recommendations made that can be picked from. The bottom line though is that in order to avoid collapse some contraction in service will be necessary. I can’t see the current postal service with its over 70,000 employees surviving long.
There’s a lesson here for other sunset sectors of the economy. I’m thinking in particular of universities. These grew at an unreasonable rate during relatively good economic times, but even back in the 1990s there were reports on how necessary some contraction was. In a period of declining enrolments and now caps put on foreign students (the lifeline that was keeping a lot of higher education afloat in this country) I don’t see a bright future for many of these institutions. And again, the alternative to contraction is collapse: just keeping on doing things the way we have until the whole system breaks down. I know it’s become an expression that’s meant to trigger a fierce reaction, but at this point we have to learn how to manage the decline.
Alex Good 