Dismantling Canada Post for parts

A Google search for Canada Post this morning

Canada’s mainstream media’s convergence was on full display today. They all have the same story out this morning: Canada Post recorded a “record” loss in 2025, at $1.57 billion. That’s about $930 million less than what Carney’s highly-stupid gas tax holiday is going to cost us, to “save” Canadians 5% on gas until the Fall (except without price controls, the gas companies are just going to raise their prices so that 5% will turn into nothing).

(Someone please tell the brainiacs at CBC that if they keep engaging in this kind of propaganda, they are next — as their “losses” (aka government funding) last year were the same as Canada Post’s)

That is also less than the $2B that was pledged to Ukraine in February. It’s about as much money as Canada has promised to hand over to corporations help them profit off of making ammunition.

In short, it’s not a whole lot of money.

But Canadian media need you to think that this is a disaster. They need you to believe that Canada Post is not viable and therefore, they must make their services even worse, so that they can finally turn a profit again.

Not to be outdone, the Toronto Star added up how much money the corporation has lost since 2018 — a whopping $6.1 billion dollars over eight years.

We’re supposed to believe that this is unsustinable. We’re supposed to believe that this is proof that Canada Post is bad and needs to be overhauled. We’re expected to believe that this loss is why we must expect less from our daily mail delivery.

The post office, for most of its existence, was a federal department — not a Crown corporation. Obviously, the mail was far too important to leave in the hands of a corporation — public or private — and so, it was operated as any other federal department was. In the 1980s, it was turned into a Crown corporation, and expected to operate on a profit-based model. That worked well enough until the Internet ate up most of our lettermail.

Today, lettermail has dropped, though parcels have increased. And Canada Post plays a key role in parcel delivery. They deliver to the places where other delivery services cannot make a profit. Their countertops are located in towns and cities across the country. Someone can help you ship your friend some cookies or send that dress back or whatever, often in a location where you don’t need to drive to.

As lettermail has dropped, the corporation has had to adjust how many letter carriers there are. It isn’t as if there is an army of Canada Post workers set to deliver ten million pieces of mail every day, and if the amount ends up being just 2 million pieces, they get a paid day off. The corporation staffs letter carriers to deliver the mail that exists. Because lots of us, especially those of us who work from home, still get mail (I get somewhere between one and four letters every day, because of my work).

But we’re expected to ignore all of this. We’re expected to want a future where beat-up vans rush in and out of our neighbourhoods, driven by young, racialized men who dart through traffic, drop the package off at your door and send you a picture (so you have something to share in the neighbourhood Facebook group when you realize the package or the door step isn’t actually yours.) These men don’t have regular, steady fulltime work. They don’t have unionized jobs. They work shit hours. They’re the future of delivery services in Canada — no less vital today than they were when Canada Post was a department, but in today’s logic, these workers are disposable and democratic control over the service is anachronistic.

This is the future that our government wants: to divest from public services, hand them over to the private sector, and allow them to go to town on running them. In the process, they create more members of Canada’s wealthy elite class, more profits and then profit hoarding, more voices who can help to ensure that the people don’t get their hands on the institutions that we rely on.

But it isn’t 1983 any more. Privatization isn’t an experiment. It’s a formula, and we all understand how to do the math. The service will become worse, more people will be laid off as private corporations run their delivery workers into the ground, and make record-breaking profits. We’ll all lament that we used to have something that worked but ultimately, whatever, I can order something from Amazon and it’s on my doorstep within 24h (I didn’t need or even want it in 24h) And I won’t even have to look at the guy who delivered it to me. Sterile. Clean. The barrier between the service worker and the service receiver grows even more thick.

Canada Post is already set up for this — their expensive service through Purolator, which is mostly owned by Canada Post — has been eating Canada Post’s most profitable routes. It’s win-win. They can show that the standard service isn’t making any money, while also show that they have the know-how to run a national courrier service at a higher profit (read: higher prices for us).

During the height of the pandemic, the one non-health public institution with the most number of deaths related to a workplace outbreak was Canada Post. There’s no question that there need to be changes in how the corporation is managed. Warehouse work can be dangerous and deadly. The global leader in this work, Amazon, is notoriously anti-union, anti worker and inhumane. Just this week, they’ve tried to deny that they forced workers to continue working after their colleague collapsed and died on the job.

But rather than see the postal service for what it is: a node of critical connection through which every single Canadian can stay in contact, Canada’s politicians are hell-bent on destroying it, with mainstream journalists cheering them on. Rather than listen to CUPW and their list of transformation options, Ministers like Joel Lightbound (who I wanted to badly confront at the liquor store this past weekend but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He must know he’s just a cog doing community-destroying work and I didn’t want to make a scene) will continue down this path of community destruction, all while a liar’s tongue says “efficiency.”

This is the time where we need to strengthen Canada’s sovereignty, not weaken it by forcing Canadians to rely more on international corporations to receive vital goods. Canada should be sending flour and lentils to every address that Canada Post delivers to, to help us feed ourselves during the affordability crisis. Canada Post should operate a non-profit national bank to offer basic banking services to Canadians, to cut into the profits made by the Big Five. Canada Post should be the agency building out an efficient national parcel delivery service.

But it can’t, because that wouldn’t make anyone billions of dollars.