Canada Post workers on nationwide strike after government demands reforms
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…you can’t compete with Amazon using ‘independent contractors’ that drive their own cars, work until 10pm, 7 days a week, with no benefits.
Will banning amazon improve post canada services?
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Then charge more for the junk mail?
why do people continually accept all of our public services getting shittier and shittier every year?
i’m not here to debate the corporate structure of canada post… whether it is a crown corp, or an arms length private corp, or whatever…
It’s a vital public service for all citizens… period. Make it work… for everyone…
Your particular use case is just one of thousands… actually, i agree with you. I technically dont need monday-friday service… but some others do and thats fine
Here’s the thing, right now for my 2-3 days of mail delivery per week, the postal service employee walks by my house every day.
The flyers that get dropped off on non mail days could just as easily be dropped off on the other 2-3 days instead.
This means that effectively for every piece of mail delivered to my house the 40-60% of the ‘last mile’ part of the postage costs are wasted on extra unneeded trips to/past my door.
For normal mail delivery we already have 5-10 day delivery timeframes. Anyone who accepts that variability doesn’t need daily delivery, and those that do need that clockwork delivery are using services like UPS or FedEx. -
Will banning amazon improve post canada services?
Making Amazon pay its workers would greatly level the playing field so Canada Post can compete again.
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Want to know how to get Canada Post back on its feet, financially? Ban private delivery services.
They don’t need to turn a profit but the costs need to be financially sustainable. I don’t think banning competition is a good move, that’s unnecessary. The question should be posed to Canadians at large: what is CP’s services worth to us, as a nation? Lemmy’s views will certainly be skewed but we need an honest holistic view. Based on godoflies@lemmy.ca calculation in this thread I’m cool with the $50 a year ‘fee’, but that will certainly grow with their losses and they do need capital investment to improve/modernize aspects of the service.
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Canada Post need to compete on quality of services, not in profits. Being not about profits should gives post canada an advantage if the government is serious at preserving quality public services
I disagree they need to compete at all. They provide essential services that aren’t replaceable by private services.
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I disagree they need to compete at all. They provide essential services that aren’t replaceable by private services.
The government is trying to make the service worse for people by seeking profitability of the service over it’s quality
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Support to these workers striking - Mark Carney promised he wouldn’t do austerity like Pollievre and hes blatantly breaking that promise with funding cuts for Canada Post. If there’s a crisis at Canada Post its because they need to be funded, not have working hours cut in the name of austerity.
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“The bottom line is this: Canada Post is effectively insolvent,” Lightbound said earlier Thursday.
“It provides an essential service to Canadians, and in particular to rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and Canadians are rightfully attached to it and want it saved. However, repeated bailouts from the federal government are not the solution.”
FFS it’s a service not a business; profit is not the goal. Paying bills for services isn’t ‘bailing out’ your service provider, it’s paying for what you’ve used.
Mail transit is essential for a modern civilization, and it’s not something that should be privately controlled. Having private options is fine, but there should ALWAYS be a federal mail service.
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Good. Eliminating all door to door deliveries is not the answer and whoever came up with that rationale needs to removed immediately.
And again, for the people in the back: Canada post is a service. It doesn’t make money. It costs money. Same way public healthcare does.
Why are they trying to spin it as a business that needs to generate profit or undertake cost cutting measures to exist and continue providing services that are still being widely used?
You don’t have to spin it as a business to say that evolving it to reflect reality makes sense. It is not exactly radical to say everybody should get the same level of service that the majority of us get today.
Fewer than 25% of Canadians have door to door delivery. Almost everybody gets delivery to a private mailbox very close to their house. Door to door delivery is down to under 4 million addresses. This is a 10 year plan to finish that transition. Not exactly aggressive.
You can still get delivery to your door if you are disabled.
Regardless of if it is a a business or an essential service, we should be honest about it. We used to send 5 times as much mail when we were fewer people. Why do we have to ignore that?
If 75% of us (like me) are totally fine with super mailboxes, I think the rest can handle it. I know that I could get away with delivery 3 times a week as well. In 2030, how time sensitive is something coming through regular mail. Let’s be real. I could wait one more day.
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Federal government is spending 13 billion on a VW battery plant in St Thomas, Ontario
That’s 13 billion dollars / 41.million Canadians = $317 per Canadian
This is projected to employ 3000 people. Canada Post employs 62,300 people.
Canada post employs 21 X as many people as the VW plant hopes too.
CP could lose 1 billion a year for 273 years before it would cost the Canadian tax payer as much per job as the VW plant workers do. And that is if the VW plant stays on target and doesn’t end up like North Volt
I don’t know what the path forward for Canada Post is but the government narrative is whack. If the government is trying to save money why are they spending so much for 3000 jobs and celebrating that as a huge win?
It seems like they don’t value workers or Canadians just corporate profits at the Canadian tax payers expense.
We should expect more from our government.
The $13B was production based tax credits. No one explains how government funding works, or the milestones.
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Because the service you mention is paid for with postage, not taxes. Their shortfall was 841 million last year. Who is supposed to pay for that?
I have direct to door delivery right now. Every day I get flyers for assholes that want to buy my house for pennies on the dollar, and actual mail maybe twice a week.
Why are we paying for delivery the other 3 days?
The simple reality is that daily direct to door delivery isn’t necessary any more, and if I had to go for a 5 minute walk to collect my mail 3 times a week, I’d be fine with that.I haven’t mailed a letter in decades, and a guy in cute shorts just brings me junk mail every day.
Society has evolved. There are no more milkmen or ice deliveries any more either.
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Why should Canada Post be “solvent”? It’s mandated to serve every Canadian address. Have you considered what that means? It means it has to send mail to the furthest reaches of Grise Fiord (look for it on Google Maps). A business would never deliver there, and they don’t because it’s not profitable. A non-discriminatory mail service is not a profit business, it’s a public service of the government. Firehalls ans library systems have budgets, but no one expects them to be solvent because they’re services supported by public funds (taxes), not businesses.
What is getting so lost in all this social media outrage, is no one is proposing the total ending of mail delivery here. It’s still going to occur, just with some adjustments coming to make the service less of a capital burner, and maybe more of a service that’s matched to the reality of a modern age. It doesn’t make much sense to me that everyone is so opposed to this. Ol’ Grise Fiord is going to still receive their mail under this new proposed system. Well I mean they were until the postal union led their employees off the job once again for the umpteenth time.
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Then charge more for the junk mail?
why do people continually accept all of our public services getting shittier and shittier every year?
i’m not here to debate the corporate structure of canada post… whether it is a crown corp, or an arms length private corp, or whatever…
It’s a vital public service for all citizens… period. Make it work… for everyone…
Your particular use case is just one of thousands… actually, i agree with you. I technically dont need monday-friday service… but some others do and thats fine
It is not ‘vital’.
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“The bottom line is this: Canada Post is effectively insolvent,” Lightbound said earlier Thursday.
“It provides an essential service to Canadians, and in particular to rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and Canadians are rightfully attached to it and want it saved. However, repeated bailouts from the federal government are not the solution.”
FFS it’s a service not a business; profit is not the goal. Paying bills for services isn’t ‘bailing out’ your service provider, it’s paying for what you’ve used.
Mail transit is essential for a modern civilization, and it’s not something that should be privately controlled. Having private options is fine, but there should ALWAYS be a federal mail service.
Seeing how we also do this with public transit, hospitals, libraries and other public services, this point of view is disappointing and unfortunately very prevalent. The only thing where we can dump billions without ever asking if it’s profitable, is roads. We can expropriate and build a 4 lane highway extension in the middle of a corn field for a little half a billion, multiple times, but funding hospitals, schools, public transit, clean water, the mail… ugh, such money pits!
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I don’t want to use anything else but a government service to deliver passports and bank cards.
Could you not return to the passport office or the bank to take care of that? We all need to set fire to billions of dollars a year because you require white gloved seven day delivery, to your door, of these things?
Passports shouldn’t be coming through the mail either, I’ve always felt that way about this, regardless of the current situation. You should be returning to a desk to pick up such an important document, and providing proper ID to a properly trained individual to receive such a thing, in a controlled environment.
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In Ontario we’ve had a proliferation of for profit career colleges. The student visa is used to get into Canada, granted by one of the for profit degree mills. But in reality they are schemes by people looking to work in Canada, that couldn’t get a proper work visa.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/20000-indian-students-didnt-show-in-class-after-arriving-in-canada-what-happened-to-themThat has nothing to do with Canada Post, though. Are you suggesting they were all lost in the mail?
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You don’t have to spin it as a business to say that evolving it to reflect reality makes sense. It is not exactly radical to say everybody should get the same level of service that the majority of us get today.
Fewer than 25% of Canadians have door to door delivery. Almost everybody gets delivery to a private mailbox very close to their house. Door to door delivery is down to under 4 million addresses. This is a 10 year plan to finish that transition. Not exactly aggressive.
You can still get delivery to your door if you are disabled.
Regardless of if it is a a business or an essential service, we should be honest about it. We used to send 5 times as much mail when we were fewer people. Why do we have to ignore that?
If 75% of us (like me) are totally fine with super mailboxes, I think the rest can handle it. I know that I could get away with delivery 3 times a week as well. In 2030, how time sensitive is something coming through regular mail. Let’s be real. I could wait one more day.
I agree with your notion of “evolving it” to fit the needs and requirements of today however I don’t agree with your other points.
Their plan is to remove door to door entirely, not just limit it to 3 days (which, I wouldn’t have any major qualms about at this time if that was the endgame, which it isn’t)
However I shouldn’t need to be disabled to receive this basic level of service, nor do I want to hobble over to the mailbox or postal office that’s “very close to my house” because the current one is a 15 minute walk on a good day, and a 35 minute trudge through half snow covered roads on a bad one. And if we’re going with this, hypothetically, how would I even know I have any mail? Do I get a call? Do I get a notice at my door? Do I just have to show up every so often and check?
If it’s option 1, I can assure you that my phone’s functions are set by default to filter and drop any unknown calls. So that’s far from an optimal approach.
If it’s option 3, I will not be randomly dropping by the postal office or box because currently nowhere near (or on) any common route that I take, and I have no reason to do a random cold check especially if I work primarily from home
And if it’s option 2, you’re already here to deliver my notice, might as well bring my mail instead.
Besides the above outlined items, I’m not going to touch the time sensitive items argument because Canada post handles more than just mail, they also handle biological deliveries, medicine, restricted substances, stuff like live bees, all your legal documents, subpoenas, medical, etc. plus a bunch of other services that I’m probably forgetting.
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It doesn’t need to be profitable, but if it’s literally burning billions of dollars a year, it’s quite obviously not efficient nor a smart use of our capital.
If billions of dollars a year is a problem, saving $20 million is meaningless. If not 1.5B a year, how much do you think is appropriate to spend so that all Canadians have mail service? How did you come to that figure?
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It doesn’t need to be profitable, but if it’s literally burning billions of dollars a year, it’s quite obviously not efficient nor a smart use of our capital.
It’s net loss in 2024 of ~800million which isn’t even a single billion. I think 20bucks a year on canada post is pretty reasonable.
E: Oh and most of that loss can be attributed to the previous strike.
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Because the service you mention is paid for with postage, not taxes. Their shortfall was 841 million last year. Who is supposed to pay for that?
I have direct to door delivery right now. Every day I get flyers for assholes that want to buy my house for pennies on the dollar, and actual mail maybe twice a week.
Why are we paying for delivery the other 3 days?
The simple reality is that daily direct to door delivery isn’t necessary any more, and if I had to go for a 5 minute walk to collect my mail 3 times a week, I’d be fine with that.Their shortfall was 841 million last year. Who is supposed to pay for that?
Taxes. It’s a government service.
The Department of National Defence had a shortfall of $28.8 billion last year, who is supposed to pay for that?The 2024 Federal budget had a revenue of 498 billion. The Canada Post “shortfall” was less than 0.2% of the budget.