What to do about Canada Post

Doug Anderson

Oct 26, 2025

In 1968, Pierre Trudeau appointed Eric Kierans as Postmaster General in his first cabinet (it was still a cabinet position back then). Judging by the Aislin cartoon from 1970 posted on Facebook recently by the cartoonist himself, nothing much has changed.

Well, yes, a lot has changed – postal rates have gone up dramatically, mail volumes have dropped dramatically as a result of email, parcel volumes have increased dramatically and numerous non-unionized competitors have taken much of that business from the post office.,

So, what’s left. Most importantly – but diminishing every year – the monopoly that Canada Post was given on letter mail. That was supposed to be the revenue generator that would keep them in the black. That’s not working out so well these days.

Kierans made a number of operational changes which included closing post offices and discontinuing mail delivery on Saturdays to reduce costs and improve postal employee work schedules. However it didn’t go so well.

55 years later the government still wants to close post offices but it wants to bring back Saturday delivery.

The biggest change has been the transition to community mailboxes which began in 2014 but came to a screeching halt when Pierre’s son Justin became Prime Minister in 2016. The transition was about half finished so that now some Canadians get door to door delivery and others have to go to their community mailbox. In Whitby (just E of Toronto) those are in banks of 3. There was a lot of opposition initially but now people generally accept it. For some seniors or for handicapped people there is hardship but Canada Post says it continues to provide those people with home delivery or provides other accommodations. I don’t know of anybody who has used any of these but I expect these exceptions are expensive for the Post Office.

From the very beginning of the community mailbox program I have questioned the wisdom of erecting the mailboxes in banks of 2 or 3 or even more. If they were erected as individual banks (roughly 15-20 addresses), there could be one in every block – most homes would have one in sight from their home which would give people some sense of security in their mail. Also neighbours might be more willing to pick up mail for neighbours.

Canada Post would have to rework its routes but stopping at individual community boxes instead of banks would likely have little impact on costs.

Completing the transition to community boxes (whether individual ones or banks) would save the PO a fair bit of money but nowhere near enough to put them into the black.

They claim that they want to get back into parcel delivery but that business is gone – picked up by non-unionized gig worker networks like the ones that deliver for Amazon or Temu. I sell some antiques and collectibles on ebay and Etsy and I’ve been using Chit Chats for about 4 years and saving a lot of money. Canada Post has tried lowering its prices but that just adds to their losses.

Much as I feel for the postal workers, they need to face the reality that the Post Office cannot continue to lose billions of dollars.

The union has suggested that Post Offices should diversify – get into postal banking for instance. I have some experience on that score. Back in the late 60s I decided I wanted to see Canada – all of it – I was on the road for 6 months, so I set up a postal bank account so I could access my money at any post office in Canada. And it worked well – but that was before Visa and Mastercard. Everybody these days carries a bank in their wallet. And that finished off postal banking. Other diversification ideas would likely duplicate services that are already well served by other businesses or institutions.

So where does all this leave us. Canada is a huge country, yet the vast majority of mail is in the metropolitan areas where gig carriers can out-hustle the post office any day of the week (including weekends). So Canada Post is left with the vast rural and thinly populated areas where delivery is costly.

There is a vast network of delivery services throughout the world – some public, some private, but in most countries the local post office provides what is called ‘final mile delivery’. Private carriers like ChitChats will transport mail to a hub close to the destination and then contract local carriers (which may be the Post Office) to complete the delivery.

This past week I sent an item via ChitChats to Indian Head, Saskatchewan. It was likely trucked to Regina, but then was transferred to Canada Post for local delivery. I don’t know how much Canada Post charges these carriers for this service but probably not enough. If they raised those charges they would make more money and might incentivize some of these private carriers to cover more of these out-of-the-way places.

That might get the post office part way to solvency but in the longer term I think Canada Post needs to accept that rather than compete with these private carriers, it needs to partner with them – maybe license them (for a fee) to do all the deliveries in the major markets and leave the rural stuff to Canada Post.

These issues are not unique to Canada Post. Post offices all over the world are having to adjust to changing dynamics – Britain’s Royal Mail was sold off several years ago and now belongs to a Czech company but the UK government retains a “golden share” that allows it to approve major changes.

So can our post office survive? Well, yes, it has to in some form or another because in the huge expanse of Canada nobody else is willing to make those deliveries to remote places – it’s a huge money loser.

I suspect that eventually the Post Office will evolve into a central contractor who will set standards and farm out deliveries to networks of private operators. Part of that might be servicing the community boxes, part might be servicing rural mail. Rural post offices would likely be privatized again – rural POs used to be contracted to local general stores until about the 1960s.

The transition will be painful and messy for the postal unions. Their best bet would be to reorganize as private units and bid for contracts.