this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
109 points (96.6% liked)

Canada

10504 readers
695 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Now is the time to draw inspiration from wherever we can, and stand with workers while they fight the employer-led race to the bottom.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 46 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

Why is nobody clueing in that if Canada Post goes under we're all gonna be stuck getting our legal documents and important mail via severely underpaid and over worked amazon delivery drivers!?

You get what you pay for. The short sightedness of all this is astounding.

[–] Eranziel@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (3 children)

The expectation that a vital public service must be a profitable company is just an ass-backward assumption from the start. What's next, are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres?

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

are we going to expect hospitals to become profit centres

Welcome to Ontario! Hospitals ARE profit centers, if they don't make enough money the board of directors have to make "changes." With the cost of treatments being set by OHIP that means the only changes available are cuts in service or staff.

Canada Post and healthcare should be treated like a military. It is overhead, the cost of being a modern country, you can try to get the most bang for your buck but the goal is to provide the absolute best service not to turn a profit.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

The debate is not about shutting down Canada Post completely, it’s about scaling back service due to rapidly falling demand. You can still have a vital postal service with weekly delivery to community mailboxes. I have received my mail at a community mailbox for over 30 years. These days I check the mail maybe twice a month. It’s a 3 minute walk each way. People with limited mobility who live in a community mailbox area can already sign up for special home delivery.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world -2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You can have a vital postal service without paying postal workers $70,000/year to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week. Weekly delivery to community mailboxes plus supplemental home delivery for people with limited mobility would save a ton of money but it would mean laying off thousands of postal workers.

This whole dispute isn’t about a vital service, it’s about a jobs program that is unjustifiable in the modern day.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not everything is a good idea to spend money on, though, even the government's money. Door-to-door letter delivery seems pretty antiquated to me.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

We still have a population where some members do not have cell phones or can't operate a computer well enough to deal with e-life. Letters are still around for some time for billing, statements, property notices, legal services, etc

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yeah, I know. You can get them from a communal box too. I do.

Accessibility has been mentioned, but as far as I know a special program for people who are totally housebound has been proposed for that.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world -2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Why do any of those need door to door delivery on a daily basis? None of them are that urgent.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 days ago

Delivery time always massively exceeds a reasonable pickup time, yeah.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So if your bill is produced say on the 1st of the month AFTER delivery was collected, now it sits till the post picks it up a week later, then transit across a province or country for several days where logistics have to work out for continuous flow, but then sits at next place for a weekly delivery, you can understand that a letter could take 2 weeks maybe 3, to reach you, and the payment due dates are sometimes short so you miss payment date, especially if you have to mail payment back. Legal documents also have response times for filings.

There are other examples but I think this illustrates why

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wrong. Businesses who send out large volumes of mail don’t wait for Canada Post to pick it up. They courier the mail to and from a CP sorting facility. I know this because I work in a mail room at a company. Even with weekly delivery for home addresses, businesses would still be sending and receiving mail on a daily basis.

Your bill would be produced and sent to a Canada Post sorting facility on the same day.

Furthermore, businesses are aware of mail transit delays. When they print the due dates on the bills they take this into account. Furthermore, businesses tend to have grace periods beyond the actual due date of the bill for this very reason.

Lastly, I will point out that the company I work for is still printing and inserting bills into envelopes even though the post offices are closed. This mail is packed in crates stacked floor to ceiling in the hallway and will be sent to Canada Post when the strike is over. If the strike goes on for a long time, many customers will receive their bills long after the due date. Customers are still expected to pay their bills on time although extra allowances are granted on a case by case basis. Many customers do use electronic transfers or pre-authorized debits from their bank accounts and so they don’t have any extra reason to miss a payment.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Right so you courier it to CP, and it may sit if you missed the outgoing weekly date.

Dates that you say are to allow for mail, but that is on a daily delivery schedule, you add several weeks delay, and businesses are now floating more coat longere. Maybe 45 days instead of 21 etc.

I agree mail sucks in a digital age, but people aren't there yet.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

No, it’s not an outgoing weekly date. Mail gets sorted and transmitted to destination post offices every day. The only thing that happens once a week is delivery to / pickup from the community mailbox. And which day that happens on depends on which neighbourhood you live in.

Think of it like waste collection. It happens every day but each neighbourhood only gets collected once a week. I may get mine collected on Tuesdays but my friend who lives in a different area gets his collected on Wednesdays. Meanwhile, the normal operations of the landfill are running every weekday.

What this means is that the postal workers who just work in the post office sorting and filling trucks continue working every day as normal. However, the postal workers who drive around and fill up the community mailboxes will work a different route each day of the week. This means one postal worker can serve 5 times as many addresses as they currently do right now (where the same postal worker drives the same route every day). Additionally, that one worker will be carrying a full 7 days worth of mail to deliver to that community rather than only a single day worth of mail (or 3 days worth on a Monday).

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I agree that would work, till the next time they want more profit and then they'd cut the first part you mentioned to be less cloection days. Mail should be a government service not a business trying to increase profits

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

There’s no profit to speak of. They’re losing billions of dollars. Those changes above would mean they lose less money, not become profitable.

Services provided can cost money without them turning them into profit-seeking companies. Why not have a mandate to use those surpluses to upgrade service or donate to charity or something?

What we should not be doing is writing blank cheques for services with declining demand.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Canada post changed from Crown service to being run as a private business though. That's when it turned to shit

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

No, it’s a Crown corporation. It’s protected by law from competition. It’s literally illegal to run a competing mail service as a private citizen / company.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Hmm, I was thinking 2013 era when they moved to the private style running of a business, I assumed they switched, because our service her sucked after that. Guy would drive ast our house to put a "sorry we missed you" tag in the community mailbox and then drive by our house on the way back out.

When the community mailbox was broken into and locks were broken, there was no method to contact CP to report it. They only had report a mail delivery failure from sender end, so I had to fake a delivery address to open a ticket with them

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Canada Post became a crown corporation in 1981. It attempted a restructuring between 2010-2017 where the duties of letter carriers were combined with those of mail service couriers. It backfired. There was a strike, a lockout, and Harper’s government forced postal workers back to work with binding arbitration. CP lost $253 million in 2011. Canada Post’s woes really began with the Internet which has caused worldwide mail volumes to plummet.

The law that made CP a crown corporation also established its government enforced monopoly on letter mail while parcel delivery remained a free market. Since then, the market price of parcels has plummeted while the price of letters has only gone up. As Canada Post has always relied on parcels to supplement its income, the falling market price for parcels has made it non-competitive in that area (except when delivering to PO Boxes, which courier services can’t do).

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

CP hasn't delivered daily for years

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Citation needed.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 days ago

Who only deliver to and around places that are profitable.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca -4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You send important legal mail by CP? No one does that.

Sorry, but these clowns are milkmen and ice deliverers in a modern world. All I get is trash and mail delivered to the wrong address.