Canada Post’s Moment Of Reckoning May Finally Be Here
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We should all stop using Amazon, first and foremost, then we should move to Canadian alternatives.
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I understand why you say it’s an environmental waste, and that has some merit, until we consider the impact of junk mail, flyers, etc. There are many areas of modern society we can economize and improve upon before we get to the impact from paper billing.
What is your alternative to a pile of paper on a desk? It needs to be persistent, timely, and reliable. Online billing portals mean I need to log in on a regular basis to multiple portals in order to check for notifications and invoices, which simply doesn’t work for my brain. Having a bill sitting out, on which I am able to write the payment amount and date, permits me to keep track of the bill throughout its lifecycle at a glance from across the room.
Can your bills not just be direct debit?
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Any solutions as to how NOT to lose $1,000,000 per day?
Didn’t think so. Let’s keep delvering junk mail door-to-door!The junk mail is one of the profits for Canada post, I personally put a sticky in my mailbox saying no junk mail. I have done a lot to avoid ads, it has not been inexpensive I have paid a lot of money to set up a system where I get very few peaces of junk mail, spam, or auto phone calls. Even though if you asked me I would have to tell you I have paid somewhere in the high hundreds (maybe $1000+) over the past ten or so years and I continue to pay lots of money (less now that I have started the buy Canadian thing) to keep me away from all the junk mail and spam the results have been priceless, Canada Post could help people with this.
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I don’t see why we can’t designate door-to-door mailing in sparsely populated areas and community mailboxes in more crowded places? Wouldn’t that save quite some money while still ensuring that people don’t have to spend ridiculous amounts of time to get their mail? I’d imagine that in more crowded places, because things are a bit more down in scale, people wouldn’t have to drive 20 minutes just to get their mail, and it would generally be a 5 minute walk.
We can do something more creative too. If there’s a nearby cafe or something, make that the community mailbox and people can grab their mail and have coffee. Your parcels would be away from the elements, and the cafe can become sort of a 3rd place. It’s more efficient land use!
We can also make community mailboxes have the ability to notify the people whenever there’s something in the mail, and people can subscribe to that system if they wish to (not everyone wants or can use digital ways of getting information). That way, it’s more difficult for people to forget about their mail. There definitely is a development cost and ongoing maintenance cost, but hey, it’s an option.
For those in sparsely populated areas, nothing much would change, if any. I think they could still have community mailboxes and just opt into it if it fits their lifestyle (eg, they choose to head out to the mailbox every Tues and Fri, for example). They can change their delivery option by going online or just visit a library or somewhere they can get a person to help them change their setting.
Is that a bit more work for postal workers to have to separate mail? It could be, but perhaps we could append some kind of token to the address to clearly distinguish door-to-door vs community mailboxes, making it easier to verify by eye, and also easier to automatically separate via a scanner if needed. Heck, could we just plaster a QR code to mail?
For those who changed their option, you might still get mail either in your community mailbox or your own mailbox, depending on what you’ve switched to.
Just spitballing here. There’s a lot you can argue about each idea, but there are many things we can do to be more efficient, make it less painful for our postal workers but also save out on cost.
I grew up in Cambridge Ontario, we had community mailboxes there since the 80s. It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto in my 20s that I discovered Canada Post does door to door mail delivery.
I mean there was no need to notify anyone. you just checked the mailbox every day. If you had a package there was a key in your regular mailbox that would open the larger boxes at the bottom. then you’d just throw the key in the mailslot at the top of the community mailbox.
I always assumed this was a thing.
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Any solutions as to how NOT to lose $1,000,000 per day?
Didn’t think so. Let’s keep delvering junk mail door-to-door!Why does the media and government ignore the fact that Canada Post has spent over $1 billion on net-zero emissions bullshit over the last few years? This is the crown corporation that is losing money hand over fist, but the leadership has somehow decided that spending over a billion dollars on enviro virtue signalling is the appopriate thing to do. Then they complain that the business is not sustainable. I would really like the media and the government to address this
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Why is nobody clueing in that if Canada Post goes under we’re all gonna be stuck getting our legal documents and important mail via severely underpaid and over worked amazon delivery drivers!?
You get what you pay for. The short sightedness of all this is astounding.
The expectation that a vital public service must be a profitable company is just an ass-backward assumption from the start. What’s next, are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres?
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I don’t really agree that you have the right to paper bills. It’s a waste all around and should be subject to additional fees. We live in a digital age, time to adapt.
I do think that remote areas deserve to receive mail for other purposes, but bills aren’t one of those.
You heard it here first folks. The people who don’t have internet, don’t need to pay for bills.
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I agree with all those points. Door to door mail delivery was a postwar job creation program in USA as far as I know, maybe it’s the same for Canada, but it is a luxury unless it’s super high density.
I have a recycling bin next to my mailbox. Almost everything goes in there. I can check it once a week.
It might make sense to continue it as a service but attach a substantial surcharge to cover the pay of the mail carriers, just like you would normally pay extra for other luxuries. We might even set the price to subsidize the service for mobility-impaired people for whom going to a community mailbox is a genuine obstacle.
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Can your bills not just be direct debit?
They may want to actually review the bills for errors before they pay them.
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Now is the time to draw inspiration from wherever we can, and stand with workers while they fight the employer-led race to the bottom.
I just want to take a moment to enjoy that the Canada Post thing is one of our country’s big political conversations. There’s a problem, and people have different solutions. Some of the solutions rely on false information or bad reasoning. Some of them are well-reasoned, but have different priorities to each other. The government will have to make a decision, and some will praise it, and some will criticize it, and it will make some peoples’ lives better, and some peoples’ lives worse.
But nobody’s using the Canada Post situation as a vehicle to hurt people they hate. People don’t seem to be moving in lockstep based on ideology and propaganda. Nobody’s been called a fascist over it because nobody’s been being a fascist over it. This is what politics should be like. It’s refreshing.
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We should all stop using Amazon, first and foremost, then we should move to Canadian alternatives.
Not really an option. Thanks to the insane cost of living and the federal government allowing Amazon to undercut Canadian business a lot of people can literally not afford to buy from anywhere else.
This shit needs to be addressed at the federal level.
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The expectation that a vital public service must be a profitable company is just an ass-backward assumption from the start. What’s next, are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres?
are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres
Welcome to Ontario! Hospitals ARE profit centers, if they don’t make enough money the board of directors have to make “changes.” With the cost of treatments being set by OHIP that means the only changes available are cuts in service or staff.
Canada Post and healthcare should be treated like a military. It is overhead, the cost of being a modern country, you can try to get the most bang for your buck but the goal is to provide the absolute best service not to turn a profit.
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They may want to actually review the bills for errors before they pay them.
You can still review it prior to it going through.
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The expectation that a vital public service must be a profitable company is just an ass-backward assumption from the start. What’s next, are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres?
Not everything is a good idea to spend money on, though, even the government’s money. Door-to-door letter delivery seems pretty antiquated to me.
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Now is the time to draw inspiration from wherever we can, and stand with workers while they fight the employer-led race to the bottom.
I think most of the problems with Canada Post is the commercialisation of it. 95% of my personal mail delivered to my community mailbox is flyers and scam inivitations to MLM’s. I’ve stopped regularly checking it every day because its always all garbage that I imeadiatly throw out. I usually check it every other week now. Plus if I get a parcel its almost always just a slip that I have to take to shoppers drug mart (not the more easily accessible post office). Its literally more convenient to get packages delivered by anyone else, because they will actually bring them to my door instead of waiting an hour in line at Shoppers so that an underpaid Shoppers drug mart employee can get me my package that any other service would have put directly into my hands.
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You can still review it prior to it going through.
Same problem as paying the bill online in the first place: you have to remember to take an unprompted action at a certain time.
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Same problem as paying the bill online in the first place: you have to remember to take an unprompted action at a certain time.
All my paperless bills come to one of my email addresses, I look at it and then delete it. I have yet to see an error. I make sure that the money comes out of my account when it is supposed to.
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Not everything is a good idea to spend money on, though, even the government’s money. Door-to-door letter delivery seems pretty antiquated to me.
We still have a population where some members do not have cell phones or can’t operate a computer well enough to deal with e-life. Letters are still around for some time for billing, statements, property notices, legal services, etc
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Now is the time to draw inspiration from wherever we can, and stand with workers while they fight the employer-led race to the bottom.
We’re all being misled here raging over CP’s reform and its losses because ‘all I get is trash mail’. Why isn’t the management of Canada Post on the hook for this? Yet we’re here blaming the union of their mismanagement? After all, they’re the ones that are making the big bucks, so they know what they’re doing right? Right? Why aren’t any of these c-suite or board stepping down/let go from doing such a terrible job? 6 straight years, 24 financial quarters. Who let this ‘experiment’ run for so long? Did this never make a blip in some federal minister’s portfolio? Well at least we know who to blame for inaction during this time for this policy failure.
- As many other have pointed out, it’s a service, not a for-profit.
- The corpro Amazon contractor-undercutting wages problem
- The Libs aren’t willing to do the hard work to actually transform CP into a cost-recovery model and fix the point above. They’d rather just do the classic ‘cut services’ while only looking at a spreadsheet without really carefully considering what they are really doing. It’s a cut to peoples jobs which means less money flowing into the economy as a whole - especially given CP’s reach. Plus, wages paid out, the federal government still taxes it. You see what I’m seeing? The ditch isn’t as big as people make it to be. Again, the Libs are pissing away a crown corp jewel again.
- CP has so much more potential with what it can do with its storage, delivery, network and database without even doing major expenditures.
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We should all stop using Amazon, first and foremost, then we should move to Canadian alternatives.
I don’t use Amazon. But plenty of other businesses use Uber Eats and other gig worker couriers.
There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle on couriers. No one is paying $70,000/year (what their salary would be if they win the labour dispute) postal workers for delivering parcels.