Junk mail is one of the only things keeping Canada Post afloat. Get rid of it and you cut off a huge source of their revenue. And without it you’d have postal workers driving around with empty trucks delivering nothing at all most days.

I personally can go weeks between receiving actual envelopes addressed to me. Everything else is junk mail. Why should postal workers be paid $70k/year for this?

Set a reminder? My phone is full of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reminders. I use my calendar as well for all kinds of events. I have repeated reminders and repeating alarms too. If you’re an older person (or just don’t like/trust technology, and I respect that) then you can use a paper calendar, daily planner, or a notebook.

But the argument that you need taxpayers to pay $70,000 a year salaries for postal workers to deliver bills to your front door because you would otherwise forget to pay your bills is an incredibly weak one.

No you wouldn’t. Those are competitive industries, despite all the griping about Canadian banks and Rogers et al. Unless you’re going to turn Canada Post into a bank (and discontinue delivering mail) they’re not going to be viable just because you add banking service.

65% of Canada Post’s costs are the salaries of postal workers. Letter volume has dropped from 5.5 billion to less than 2 billion over the past 2 decades. Since the strike began, plans are in motion for many businesses that send a lot of mail to switch to electronic. Plenty of businesses that send out millions of letters per year are using the strike as a kick in the butt to switch to electronic. When the strike ends the volume won’t even come close to getting back to 2 billion.

Without the military what’s stopping Trump from invading?

You can have a vital postal service without paying postal workers $70,000/year to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week. Weekly delivery to community mailboxes plus supplemental home delivery for people with limited mobility would save a ton of money but it would mean laying off thousands of postal workers.

This whole dispute isn’t about a vital service, it’s about a jobs program that is unjustifiable in the modern day.

Why do any of those need door to door delivery on a daily basis? None of them are that urgent.

The debate is not about shutting down Canada Post completely, it’s about scaling back service due to rapidly falling demand. You can still have a vital postal service with weekly delivery to community mailboxes. I have received my mail at a community mailbox for over 30 years. These days I check the mail maybe twice a month. It’s a 3 minute walk each way. People with limited mobility who live in a community mailbox area can already sign up for special home delivery.

I don’t think government services need to turn a profit to exist. Including the military.

The military isn’t a public service. It’s the fundamental exercise of the government’s sovereignty over the country.

Canada Post doesn’t need to turn a profit either. But it shouldn’t be losing billions of dollars to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week when it could deliver weekly to community mailboxes (supplemented by home delivery for those in need) and provide the same vital service at a fraction of the cost.

You send important legal mail by CP? No one does that.

Sorry, but these clowns are milkmen and ice deliverers in a modern world. All I get is trash and mail delivered to the wrong address.

CP hasn’t delivered daily for years

Citation needed.

The Leap Manifesto had some very good ideas about using Canada Post as a vehicle for a green transition: https://rabble.ca/economy/postal-workers-launch-ambitious-proposal-could-redefine-canadas-economy/

Defence is absolutely a service the government is providing the country. Define it however you will, that is the nature of the thing.

As for the rest, everyone keeps banging on about junk mail but I seem to get other things in the mail regularly as well.

Call defence a service if you want. The point is that it doesn’t vary with supply and demand. The government decides how much it wants to spend on defence and that’s the budget.

Mail is different. If everyone sent 10x as much mail as we do now there wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we live in. Mail is in steep decline from 5.5 billion letters 2 decades ago to 2 billion today and dropping. Most of that mail is sent by businesses who are increasingly looking for ways to further cut it back.

The company I work for spends millions of dollars a year sending out mail, much of it to customers who have opted out of receiving mail but get it anyway because of legacy databases and slow-moving business decisions. The postal strike has a lot of managers now prioritizing the rectification of that issue. We’re going to see a huge drop in outgoing mail volumes and that will directly hit Canada Post’s bottom line.

My brother in Christ… the CP is how the government sends you documents.

So if your bill is produced say on the 1st of the month AFTER delivery was collected, now it sits till the post picks it up a week later, then transit across a province or country for several days where logistics have to work out for continuous flow, but then sits at next place for a weekly delivery, you can understand that a letter could take 2 weeks maybe 3, to reach you, and the payment due dates are sometimes short so you miss payment date, especially if you have to mail payment back. Legal documents also have response times for filings.

There are other examples but I think this illustrates why

Wrong. Businesses who send out large volumes of mail don’t wait for Canada Post to pick it up. They courier the mail to and from a CP sorting facility. I know this because I work in a mail room at a company. Even with weekly delivery for home addresses, businesses would still be sending and receiving mail on a daily basis.

Your bill would be produced and sent to a Canada Post sorting facility on the same day.

Furthermore, businesses are aware of mail transit delays. When they print the due dates on the bills they take this into account. Furthermore, businesses tend to have grace periods beyond the actual due date of the bill for this very reason.

Lastly, I will point out that the company I work for is still printing and inserting bills into envelopes even though the post offices are closed. This mail is packed in crates stacked floor to ceiling in the hallway and will be sent to Canada Post when the strike is over. If the strike goes on for a long time, many customers will receive their bills long after the due date. Customers are still expected to pay their bills on time although extra allowances are granted on a case by case basis. Many customers do use electronic transfers or pre-authorized debits from their bank accounts and so they don’t have any extra reason to miss a payment.

Right so you courier it to CP, and it may sit if you missed the outgoing weekly date.

Dates that you say are to allow for mail, but that is on a daily delivery schedule, you add several weeks delay, and businesses are now floating more coat longere. Maybe 45 days instead of 21 etc.

I agree mail sucks in a digital age, but people aren’t there yet.

Delivery time always massively exceeds a reasonable pickup time, yeah.