The public post office has been set up to fail.
Its high-paid executives have mismanaged it, provoking a labour dispute and spending $470 million on an unnecessary new high-tech processing facility in Scarborough, Ontario.
Successive federal governments have encumbered it with various restrictions and mandates, forcing it to compete with multinational corporations like Amazon. They have refused to fund it, calling its $841 million 2024 deficit an unsustainable “loss,” even while pledging to throw more than $62 billion at the armed forces this year. They have implied that it is irrelevant in the age of email and Amazon, but when postal workers demand better wages, suddenly it is an essential service that rural communities and small businesses rely on. This cynical justification is used repeatedly to undermine the workers.
In truth the post office is far from irrelevant. It is under attack to boost private profits at the expense of poor and working people.
What would be lost
If this attack succeeds, postal services will be cut, giving the profitable parts to big business. This de facto privatization would end universal service in Canada, as deliveries to rural and northern communities are not profitable. Seniors would be disproportionately affected, as many do not use email. Small charities, that receive many of their donations in the mail, would suffer.
It would mean much higher prices. During the last postal strike, an Ottawa resident was quoted $57 by UPS and $62 by FedEx to send a Christmas card to her son in Vancouver; Canada Post would charge less than $1.50.
And it would hurt Canadian workers by replacing good union jobs with those that force workers to pee into bottles to save time. It would greatly weaken the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) — a pillar of the labour movement (in 1981 CUPW won a victory that led to paid parental leave for all Canadian workers). A weakened labour movement is bad news for all workers in Canada — and good news for the bosses.
What could be won
If the post office disappears, then so too does its yet-unrealized potential.
Postal workers have put forward an imaginative and inspiring plan, Delivering Community Power, that calls for an expansion of services that would greatly benefit poor and working people. It would re-create postal banking (abolished in 1968) that would challenge the big banks’ oligopoly. Letter carriers would perform regular safety checks on seniors. A low-cost food delivery system would make life easier for the mobility challenged or for busy parents. Post offices in small towns would double as community hubs that would bring people together and host activities for youth, and would act as high-speed Internet providers for communities ignored by the telecom giants.
The Delivering Community Power plan is the opposite of what the rich and the banks want. It protects postal workers’ union jobs and thus strengthens the wider labour movement, it makes the public post office even more relevant, and it creates low-cost public services that would compete with the price-gouging private sector.
How to win
Postal workers are on the front lines of the fight to save the post office. But they need a fighting union leadership and community support to win.
Many postal workers are frustrated that the CUPW leadership meekly obeyed the back-to-work order that ended their strike last winter, and that they called for binding arbitration, which sacrifices bargaining power. Worker morale and confidence in the union must be rebuilt.
To do this, the privatization agenda should be highlighted. CUPW’s slogan “Hand Off My Post Office” should be everywhere, along with public rallies held across the country to build mass support. Other unions should be rallied to the cause. Delivering Community Power’s program should be put forward boldly and loudly.
The Crown Corporation model has serious flaws; the post office should be brought more firmly under popular democratic control. But the bosses’ agenda is far worse. All workers should mobilize to defend postal workers. Their fight is our fight.
