Canada Post may soon stop delivering to your door

Yesterday, the federal government announced its plan to stabilize the future of Canada Post, including the end of door-to-door mail delivery and the implementation of community mailboxes. The crown corporation has been bleeding money for a while now—about $10 million a day, according to Public Works and Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the steady decline of snail mail over the past two decades. According to the Crown corporation, business is down from 5.5 billion letters in 2006 to 2 billion letters last year. And the decline in package deliveries has been even more drastic: in 2019, Canada Post covered 69 per cent of that market; today, it covers just 24 per cent. Thanks a lot, Jeff Bezos.

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Four million Canadian households would be affected by a shift to community mailboxes, which would save Canada Post upward of $400 million a year, per the federal government’s projections. And for the three-quarters of Canadians who already receive mail by this method, it would be business as usual.

The recommendation to nix door delivery, as well as to end the moratorium on closing some rural post offices and to slow the pace of regular mail delivery, came earlier this year via the Kaplan report, a government-commissioned third-party review of the challenges facing traditional mail delivery. Yesterday’s announcement was the feds giving the go-ahead to move forward with the changes.

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While Canada Post seems thrilled, its 52,000 workers—whose jobs will be massively impacted—are “outraged and appalled.” Now, members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers are on strike for the second time in a year. “No new items will be accepted until the national disruption is over,” says a statement from the CUPW.

Union negotiator Jim Gallant told the CBC that the current narrative around Canada Post’s financial state is untrue. He says that profits are down because postal workers have been on strike periodically over the past year and because of the pandemic’s disruption to all industries. (Notably, the corporation’s CEO salary—in the realm of $500,000 before bonuses—seems to have survived the decline unscathed.) There are plenty of ways to combat “the Amazon Effect,” Gallant says, if the corporation and union could finish bargaining a collective agreement and get back to the business of “neither snow nor rain nor heat…”

Torontonians accustomed to home delivery are pretty crusty about the changes and will likely get behind their local mail carriers. So maybe don’t repurpose that mailbox into a tasteful planter just yet.