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?

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.