“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.

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.

The $13B was production based tax credits. No one explains how government funding works, or the milestones.

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.

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.

It is not ‘vital’.

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!

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.

That has nothing to do with Canada Post, though. Are you suggesting they were all lost in the mail?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Exactly, we should all be outraged at the other expenditures that the federal government is pushing. What good does a VW battery plant do for us as Canadians as a whole when it’s for a private foreign company???

I will also say, you can’t compare a battery plant to a postage service. The model to fund CP used to work until it didn’t.

We should be asking what went wrong? Why is that so? Why aren’t their executives being fired and the board changed? Did they even ask their own union employees for real feedback on what can be changed other than the tidbits we hear in the news? Because it seems like these days a lot of upper to mid management seem to be trying real hard to justify their own existences - elected government officials included (which we should always keep them to the fire and expect a high level of competence for handling our taxpayer money and good governance for us all equally).

Best I can find the government gave a $1 billion loan to Canada Post.

The toal expenditures in the 2024 budget was $538 billion.

This is having $500 in wallet and being concerned that the $1 you loaned to someone could have been spent better.

The only people that benefit from competition, are the ones who own the company.

Ask people in BC how much they benefit from ICBC having a monopoly on car insurance…

Canada post’s costs are less than 1% of the government budget.

If we’re looking to save money there’s better places to look.

Oh I am aware that they don’t really need to turn a profit. Net zero / cost recovery is more than good enough. And I am in no way implying using government legislation to regulate that market. We need Canada Post to change their business model where they can still retain their currently hired employees. Are they seriously not able to make significant changes to their existing model to be more competitive? It reeks of a non-innovative c-suite and board (and government officials) unwilling to take the hard road of actually working with the employees to make complex organizational changes. They are taking the easy way out via ‘standard accounting/business practices’ by slashing services and worker layoffs. That’s the easy way out.

What does the hard way look like? How about sitting down with union employees down to the lowest worker level and actually find ways for cost savings and new business opportunities to patch the shortfall? I don’t to believe that CP management truly has tried other than finger-pointing at external private businesses stealing their lunch from underneath them or government legislation that’s unwilling to change (because the fed gov is really the one in control here - so again, I’m saying they’re just taking the easy way out. You think an elected federal government employee is going to sit down and do the hard work to go around talking to a large number of union employees to find a way through all this? My bet is no - they’ll take the easy way out.)

Unless the government is going to make Internet access an essential service and make sure all homes have access the same way they have access to electricity and water…

Yes, it is vital that everyone have access to mail.

I don’t see why it should be subsidized with taxes.
Deutsche Post manages to successfully keep mail flowing as an independent self funded service, why can’t Canada Post?
The simple fact of the matter is that the union is unwilling to budge on finding ways to improve efficiency because the more employees they have paying dues, the more they get paid.
If this was a private company, they’d be willing to work it out because they’d be afraid of the business folding, but here they think the well runs not just deep, but infinitely so.