About the Strike

The Canada Post strike exposes so many weaknesses in our society.

Should the workers be striking? Absolutely. It’s their right.

Should Canada Post services be declared an ‘essential service’? It should. Yes, I’m contradicting myself: essential services typically don’t give workers and owners much room for active strikes.

Should we look at Canada Post as a profit/loss project as opposed to a Crown corporation. Absolutely not.
(And stop listening to the pro-privatization agenda coming out of places like the Fraser Institute).

Canada Post should have been Canada’s great gateway to the digital era. It should have been the single platform for several core services:

• Your very own ‘Canada’ email address, with perks and features, much like Google’s Gmail or other cloud email services.
• Bill presentment, as seen with ePost Canada, the online bill payment service that was introduced in the early 2000s … but didn’t do very well because it wasn’t user-friendly (again … I know I’m contradicting my previous point).
• National and international cost-effective shipping, especially for qualifying small businesses.

There’s loads more, but here’s why Canada Post is losing money: they keep subsidizing junk mail to the tune of $0.25 to $4.00 per piece of ‘direct mail’ (ie. garbage) that Canadians don’t want.

If you want Canada Post to abide by the markets, start charging market rates (or more) for home delivery of junk mail.

That would raise billions per year until most businesses and other organizations come to realize that it’s not an effective form of marketing.

Now, what does this mean with respect to the strike?

The variety of contradictions that we try to impose on Canada Post make the situation a genuine challenge. Until we make it a Crown Corporation with a specific agenda of working for CANADIANS, the strike mess will continue and people will happily point their fingers at others as the source of blame.

That said, postal workers are hard-working people and we expect a lot from them. Reasonable increases in wages are not really the issue here.

The issue is poor management and perpetuating the myth the Canadian companies need mailing subsidies in order to push their junk and waste on the Canadian population.

Unfortunately, real solutions can’t be implemented quickly, so many Canadians will have to consider other options during this holiday season. And when people look at other options, they have a tendency to not return to something as necessary and reliable as Canada Post.