What Canada Post could have been

Once again Canada Post is in the headlines. Contract time with CUPW, so we get the predictable sob-fest about how Canada Post loses gazillions of dollars every day and therefore can’t afford to pay its workers a living wage. Over the decades that we’ve been watching the never-ending death-spiral, I think the government missed a couple of key opportunities to make Canada Post into something far more relevant. Canada Post has a mandate to provide mail service to every community in the country. That’s a high bar, and an expensive one. The government-appointed CEO has a different mandate; cut costs. That conflict in mandates led to some hilarious moments. Deepak Chopra was CEO when “Community mailboxes” were being brought in as a cost-cutting measure. Instead of having mail delivered to your door, you could walk to wherever Canada Post planted your community mailbox. That might be half a block away or ten blocks away. Needless to say, this initiative was way more popular with Deepak’s political bosses than with his customers. Nevertheless, Deepak claimed he was inundated with calls from grateful seniors, delighted to be given a reason to walk a few blocks and get some exercise! But I digress. What were those opportunities that might have changed the trajectory of Canada Post? In the first place, in the course of bringing postal service to every community in the land, why could Canada Post not have also provided banking services to all those places too? It’s a well established fact that smaller, out-of-the way communities in rural Canada lack adequate banking. It’s an equally well established fact that poor neighborhoods lack banking facilities. Of course they do! How is a bank gonna make a buck in a poor neighborhood? Instead, the “banking” has been replaced by predatory cheque-cashing joints. Pairing mail service with banking services is hardly a new idea, it’s been the norm in many countries for decades. Secondly, consider the totally inept way legal cannabis was rolled out. In my opinion, the entire exercise was a massive boondoggle designed to throw the biz to Bay Street. Why could they not have made Post Offices the official pot retailers? After all, there’s already a Post Office (and bank) in every community! Once you’ve got the Post Office, bank, and pot dispensary, you’ve got the makings of a community hub! That would have worked wonders for community cohesion. Alas, that would have required political will on a scale not seen since we build a trans-continental railroad. Those days are gone. People who had vision and could get things done have long since given way to management apparatchiks like Deepak Chopra, who are fully convinced that providing shittier service at a lower cost is something to celebrate. After all, that’s the key to their annual bonus and their next promotion.

Behind the scenes arm-twisting suspected as Canada Post backs away from community mailboxes

Joint-blazin' Justin is showing his totalitarian tendencies early. A mere week after the election he's succeeded in extinguishing one of the most popular public health programs in the land.

Canadian's were overjoyed when Canada Post boss Deepak Chopra announced the end of home mail delivery a year and a half ago. Like many of my countrymen, I had been lobbying Deepak for years to do away with this nostalgic backward-looking tradition. For gosh's sakes, what with pizza delivery, booze delivery, and Amazon's everything else delivery, getting the bills out of the friggin' community mailbox is pretty much the only reason to leave the house!

We're in for a long four or five years folks, if this is the way the Pothead starts... pandering to the postal workers union and depriving us seniors of the opportunity to get a little exercise.

Things that shouldn't happen when your Prime Minister is an "economist"

It's true; Big Steve has a MA in economics from the University of Calgary. It's available for your perusal online if you care to look for it. It doesn't necessarily reveal a lot about Harper other than the fact that even at a relatively young age he was obsessed with the machinations of power. Of all the directions one's interest in the dismal science could take, you obviously need to be a power-junkie-in-training to research correlations between deficit financing and election cycles.

My morning Globe and Mail had two stories that I found relevant to Harper's education. The first is the Statscan debacle regarding last week's release of flawed employment numbers. That has impacts on everything from interest rates to currency exchange rates to how long Buddy who just got laid off will have to wait for his pogey cheque. In other words, it matters.

Consistent with the Harper government's across-the-board policy of keeping Canadians in the dark, no one is allowed to tell us the nature of the mistake. Instead, they're working hard on "fixing" the numbers and will release the do-over tomorrow.

Typically the dismal scientists doing the number-crunching at Statscan will have way more behind their names than MAs from the University of Calgary, so why the shoddy workmanship? Could it be the result of the Harper gang's obsession with defunding frivolous research in all areas of the social sciences? And of course, when you have all the answers to begin with, all research becomes frivolous.

The other story concerns the government strategy of stemming the supposed unsustainable losses at Canada Post. As a society we have been bamboozled into believing that the postal service should be run like a business. Insofar as that is true, and the business is struggling to compete, would the business model not demand a downward adjustment in pricing and improvement in service in order to recapture market share?

The fact that the Harper government is doing exactly the opposite signals that their true intention is to allow Canada Post to atrophy. Eliminating home delivery and doubling the price of stamps is a strategy to wind down the post office, not build a foundation for its survival.

Treating essential services as though they were a business is profoundly wrong to begin with. Like health care, education, national and local security, postal service is a public good that by definition cannot be fairly evaluated on the basis of whether it turns a profit or a loss. The asinine comments by Canada Post boss Deepak Chopra to the effect that he is cutting home delivery to appease the many seniors who have been deluging him with demands to deliver their mail to a community mailbox blocks away from their home, so they can get some exercise, just adds insult to injury.

Oh, it's a crazy Orwellian world, this land 'o Harper is!

Another "first" for Canada!

This story in the Guardian confirms that Canadians have more than the recent Sochi hockey gold trifecta to be proud of.

Canada is the first of the G-20 countries to not have door-to-door mail delivery! According to Canada Post head honcho Deepak Chopra, Canadians have for a long time been deluging him with requests to eliminate home mail delivery so that they could instead enjoy a bracing ramble in the fresh air to a community mail drop some miles hence!

Which will no doubt result in even more savings as the citizens get healthier and health care expenditures plummet!

Canada Post and the memory hole

The announcement last week that Canada Post was to take itself out of the mail delivery business got me floating down memory lane just bit.

When we moved out here to Falling Downs the Post Office was just doing a review of rural mailbox safety. There had been a mailbox out in front of this place since the invention of the postage stamp, with never a hint that the mailbox might be unsafe. As a society, we are of course more safety conscious than we used to be, so I was not surprised when the safety review concluded that our mailbox had to go.

We've been picking up our mail from Mrs. Wallace at the Kemble PO ever since, so losing home delivery doesn't mean anything around here.

It means a lot to a lot of folks though, which is why the parliamentary transport committee had that emergency meeting today. Canada Post boss Deepak Chopra was called to explain the Canada Post decision to eliminate home mail delivery and double the price of a stamp.

Hilarity ensued.

In reply to concerns that seniors and shut-ins depend on home delivery, Chopra revealed that he has been besieged by seniors and shut-ins clamouring for the opportunity to get more exercise and fresh air by taking their walker or mobility scooter a couple of blocks to a community mail drop.

Isn't that great!

We're eliminating home delivery to give seniors a chance to get more fresh air and exercise!

As I recall, that's hardly the first time Canada Post indulged in egregious Orwell-think.

Must have been back in the 70's or 80's when Canada Post closed the main Guelph post office. The reason? According to the sign posted at the front door, it was to serve the public better! Yes, the public in Guelph would be better served by having their mail channelled to Kitchener fifteen miles away to be sorted.

So a Guelphite sending a letter across town, or to someone on the next block, was better served by having their mail sent to Kitchener for sorting, and then sent back to Guelph for delivery.

Even before that, I remember when Canada Post spent hundreds of millions making sure that French-speaking Canadians could find the nearest post office no matter where they were in the country. It sticks in my memory because I used to make frequent trips to the Suzuki dealer in Bridgeport, which was hard by the Bridgeport Post Office, and also conveniently nearby a well-known strip joint.

You could pick up a few bike parts, a stamp, and enjoy an afternoon of adult entertainment all in one go!

It must have taken a month to change the signage on that post office from "Canada Post" to "Canada Post/ Poste Canada."

At least now the non-English speaking residents of Bridgeport could find the post office. That's "inclusivity", ain't it?

Number of uni-lingual French-speakers in Bridgeport Ontario in 1969? None! And if there were any, I'm guessing those who were not entirely brain-dead might have, entirely on their own, figured out that Canada Post was in fact the same post office as Poste Canada.

The demise of home delivery also calls other serpents out of the memory hole. In that long ago era before e-mail, long distance love affairs used to rely on the postal service to keep connected. Ah, the sweet sorrow of running out to the mailbox every day to see if the beloved has favoured you with a few words!

I remember being hit hard by a bad case of first love. I'd made a trip to the old country and met a girl, Gudrun. Oh ya, that was the real thing!

How I looked forward to the next letter! It always took weeks longer than I thought it should have. But when it finally arrived!... oh the sweet bliss!

That all ended rather painfully with the letter that informed me that her loyalties were henceforth with the drummer of the local Christian rock band.

To this day I harbour a profound skepticism about Christian rock.

But it was Canada Post that facilitated that love, that longing, that long distance relationship, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for the folks who deliver a letter right to your door.

According to the linked article, Dan Kelly, CEO of the Federation of Independent Businesses, claims that the Post Office has run itself onto the rocks by paying 40% higher wages than his members. That's a massive 40% premium over minimum wage in other words. Canada Post must be wound down because it has dug such a deep hole by paying its workers a living wage.

I think what Dan is really getting at is that there's a lot of room for downsizing at Canada Post. Privatize the whole damned operation. Turn those living wage jobs into minimum wage jobs. That's how the rest of the working class lives; what's so special about postal workers?

Not only that, but Canada Post owns a lot of triple A real estate in the downtown core of many cities. Obviously, the highest and best use for all that prime real estate would be office towers and condos. If the Harper gang were to turn all that juicy downtown real estate over to the private sector, they might be able to avoid a tax increase for a year or two!

Meanwhile, whatever skeleton operations a government postal service might retain could be sourced out of private-sector industrial parks on the edge of town.

That's a win-win and win again!