Canada Post is a common good. It doesn’t need to turn a profit or even break even and I’m happy to pay my taxes to have it around even if I’m not the one benefiting from it. One day I might need it.
Like healthcare.
Agreed, but it can’t just be a money pit. Something has to change, and it doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating jobs.
Define money pit? explain what aspects of CP are a money pit?
Other than the salaries of the people in charge of course.
It’s a public service it’s not supposed to be profitable, at most it should be revenue neutral but that’s not possible when they activity ruin the system and push people to private companies.
It’s all just a scam dude, it’s to break faith in Canada Post so they can privitize it like they do with everything else.
From what I’ve seen, letter mail is going down in use and costing more every year. That’s a money pit.
I 100% agree that it doesn’t have to make money, and can operate at a loss, but the losses are growing at an unsustainable rate.
So, all I’m saying is that something has to change.
Even the union is saying something has to change. They’ve said many times that CP is being mismanaged and have proferred ideas for changes (like having postal workers become wellness checkers as well.) I can make a bunch of suggestions that I think are great ideas, but I’m no expert.§
But, it seems to me that the first thing that needs to change is the charter, so that the operations can change without being handcuffed by its antiquated rules.
Again, change doesn’t have to mean eliminating jobs. The jobs can change to something more efficient and useful.
§ some other ideas I’ve heard or have thought of: changing the daily delivery model to an address focused one; rapid local delivery services; reducing home delivery and using community mail boxes (and pairing this with being able to register for home delivery on an as-needed-basis); becoming competitive in the parcel/e-commerce delivery space; getting into returns management for e-commerce (which could help with the waste and scams issues here too); Postal banking; Digital ID verification (like the banks do now for example); etc.
While letter mail is going down packages are going up, rather than going and taking advantage they made it to expensive to use so everyone went elsewhere. I wouldn’t say money pit, Its a tank with a hole in the bottom that the government pretends doesn’t exist pointing to the tiny hose on-top we can see on-top with a dribble coming out.
Everything else 100% give me postal banking.
Parcel volume is way up but Canada Post parcel service is way more expensive than the competition, so all the business is going elsewhere. Amazon just uses gig workers to deliver parcels at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard parcels, plus Amazon’s drivers work on the weekend whereas postal workers do not.
The exact same thing would happen to letter mail if it weren’t illegal to deliver cheap letter mail in Canada (because Canada Post has a monopoly on standard letter mail).
I don’t think it’s even remotely possible for Canada Post to compete with gig workers on parcels without massive subsidies from taxpayers. I can’t imagine a world in which taxpayer subsidies for Amazon to deliver cheap packages via postal workers instead of gig workers would ever be politically feasible.
Absolutely, let’s outsource the most expensive workers. The ones on the board who have mismanaged the corporation.
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What service do you use that turns a profit and why would you want it to extract profit from said service?
What you are describing is the US Healthcare system. They pay more, by far, than any country in the world for Healthcare exactly because it’s a for-profit service.
So what you are saying is you like to pay more for a service because of the free market that the service doesn’t belong to.
Capitalism has messed up our brains.
I didn’t describe shit. I just said it needs to change. I didn’t even say they need to turn a profit. They shouldn’t waste money just because of a bunch of arbitrary rules that were set out decades ago. I even said the changes didn’t have to eliminate jobs.
They are okay with you punching them?!
Dad joke. +1
I’m usually very supportive of union strikes. Not this one though, the world has moved on from letter post, and while I think it’s important to still exist at a basic level I see no problems with the plans they’re proposing to remove home services entirely.
Yes a whole bunch of people are going to lose their jobs, and a few elderly people may need to figure out how to get a neighbour to grab their mail for them.
This is the reality of a digital world though, we shouldn’t keep jobs just for the sake of keeping jobs. Walking to your mailbox simply isn’t that big a deal that we should be paying $200 million a year to keep house delivery for a specific group of people (many people already dont have it)
The myth of keeping jobs just for jobs, and home delivery being antiquated, really suggests a lack of understanding.
I love how you gloss over an entire spectrum of impairments by simply suggesting old- or different-abled people trivially choose a willing volunteer to take them to their mailbox 10 feet or 20 km down the road in a country as sparse as this one and in an era of such community disconnect.
The “I don’t need it so no one gets it” is just a bad look. You see a shoreline often?
They don’t need a volunteer. There already exists a service to have mail picked up for free and delivered to your house weekly. This is used by many elderly and disabled people who live in the 3/4 of Canadian households that use community mailboxes instead of home delivery. This service is not going away.
So the whole elderly and disabled people claim is a straw man, not a real issue.
Nah it doesn’t. It suggests that I’m being realistic.
These people have a method of getting food to their homes, they can figure out the mail too.
It’s like you’re imagining there are millions of crippled people living all alone in the middle of nowhere. They’d be dead if that was the case. They either live with caregivers, or they have caregivers that come over regularly.
I don’t need it. My parents don’t need it. My grandparent(the one that’s left) doesn’t need it. In fact I don’t know a single person who couldn’t get their own mail or lives with someone who could.
I live in a rural area, and I can see a shoreline from my house. It’s quite pleasant actually.
