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.

So if your bill is produced say on the 1st of the month AFTER delivery was collected, now it sits till the post picks it up a week later, then transit across a province or country for several days where logistics have to work out for continuous flow, but then sits at next place for a weekly delivery, you can understand that a letter could take 2 weeks maybe 3, to reach you, and the payment due dates are sometimes short so you miss payment date, especially if you have to mail payment back. Legal documents also have response times for filings.

There are other examples but I think this illustrates why

Wrong. Businesses who send out large volumes of mail don’t wait for Canada Post to pick it up. They courier the mail to and from a CP sorting facility. I know this because I work in a mail room at a company. Even with weekly delivery for home addresses, businesses would still be sending and receiving mail on a daily basis.

Your bill would be produced and sent to a Canada Post sorting facility on the same day.

Furthermore, businesses are aware of mail transit delays. When they print the due dates on the bills they take this into account. Furthermore, businesses tend to have grace periods beyond the actual due date of the bill for this very reason.

Lastly, I will point out that the company I work for is still printing and inserting bills into envelopes even though the post offices are closed. This mail is packed in crates stacked floor to ceiling in the hallway and will be sent to Canada Post when the strike is over. If the strike goes on for a long time, many customers will receive their bills long after the due date. Customers are still expected to pay their bills on time although extra allowances are granted on a case by case basis. Many customers do use electronic transfers or pre-authorized debits from their bank accounts and so they don’t have any extra reason to miss a payment.

Right so you courier it to CP, and it may sit if you missed the outgoing weekly date.

Dates that you say are to allow for mail, but that is on a daily delivery schedule, you add several weeks delay, and businesses are now floating more coat longere. Maybe 45 days instead of 21 etc.

I agree mail sucks in a digital age, but people aren’t there yet.

Delivery time always massively exceeds a reasonable pickup time, yeah.

Yeah, I know. You can get them from a communal box too. I do.

Accessibility has been mentioned, but as far as I know a special program for people who are totally housebound has been proposed for that.

No, it’s not an outgoing weekly date. Mail gets sorted and transmitted to destination post offices every day. The only thing that happens once a week is delivery to / pickup from the community mailbox. And which day that happens on depends on which neighbourhood you live in.

Think of it like waste collection. It happens every day but each neighbourhood only gets collected once a week. I may get mine collected on Tuesdays but my friend who lives in a different area gets his collected on Wednesdays. Meanwhile, the normal operations of the landfill are running every weekday.

What this means is that the postal workers who just work in the post office sorting and filling trucks continue working every day as normal. However, the postal workers who drive around and fill up the community mailboxes will work a different route each day of the week. This means one postal worker can serve 5 times as many addresses as they currently do right now (where the same postal worker drives the same route every day). Additionally, that one worker will be carrying a full 7 days worth of mail to deliver to that community rather than only a single day worth of mail (or 3 days worth on a Monday).

I agree that would work, till the next time they want more profit and then they’d cut the first part you mentioned to be less cloection days. Mail should be a government service not a business trying to increase profits

There’s no profit to speak of. They’re losing billions of dollars. Those changes above would mean they lose less money, not become profitable.

Services provided can cost money without them turning them into profit-seeking companies. Why not have a mandate to use those surpluses to upgrade service or donate to charity or something?

What we should not be doing is writing blank cheques for services with declining demand.

Canada post changed from Crown service to being run as a private business though. That’s when it turned to shit

No, it’s a Crown corporation. It’s protected by law from competition. It’s literally illegal to run a competing mail service as a private citizen / company.

Hmm, I was thinking 2013 era when they moved to the private style running of a business, I assumed they switched, because our service her sucked after that. Guy would drive ast our house to put a “sorry we missed you” tag in the community mailbox and then drive by our house on the way back out.

When the community mailbox was broken into and locks were broken, there was no method to contact CP to report it. They only had report a mail delivery failure from sender end, so I had to fake a delivery address to open a ticket with them

Canada Post became a crown corporation in 1981. It attempted a restructuring between 2010-2017 where the duties of letter carriers were combined with those of mail service couriers. It backfired. There was a strike, a lockout, and Harper’s government forced postal workers back to work with binding arbitration. CP lost $253 million in 2011. Canada Post’s woes really began with the Internet which has caused worldwide mail volumes to plummet.

The law that made CP a crown corporation also established its government enforced monopoly on letter mail while parcel delivery remained a free market. Since then, the market price of parcels has plummeted while the price of letters has only gone up. As Canada Post has always relied on parcels to supplement its income, the falling market price for parcels has made it non-competitive in that area (except when delivering to PO Boxes, which courier services can’t do).

@BrikoX Personally think they should transform Canada Post into a workers co-op.