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?

You heard it here first folks. The people who don’t have internet, don’t need to pay for bills.

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.

They may want to actually review the bills for errors before they pay them.

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.

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.

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.

You can still review it prior to it going through.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The postal workers would absolutely reject a plan for weekly door to door delivery because it would mean laying off tons of postal workers.

And how do you even make that work financially? Door to door delivery is insanely expensive, especially in rural areas. That means driving many km from farm to farm to deliver all the mail instead of just taking it to the town post office.

How is it possible to both lay off a ton of postal workers but be even less financially viable? It’s the per-letter costs. Door to door raises the per-letter costs and weekly delivery reduces the volume (because businesses who need daily delivery go elsewhere) and so you lay off a ton of postal workers but your volume falls off a cliff and you still lose money.

People who live in the country are already vehicle dependent anyway (no one’s living in the country ordering Uber Eats every day and paying a fortune on long distance delivery fees). It doesn’t hurt them to drive to the post office once a week (or even once a month) to get their mail.

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?