Canada Post could go on strike again. Here's what we know about where things stand

The recent Canada Post strike lasted a month last winter, causing havoc with passport delivery and harming small businesses during the seasonal rush. One of the last major actions of the previous Liberal government was o rdering postal workers back to work a week before Christmas. But this reprieve from labour unrest in one of Canada’s most troubled Crown corporations is proving brief. As two deadlines near, another Canada Post strike is possible as early as later this month. Negotiations between Canada Post and its union resumed this week, after breaking off without agreement in March. The existing collective agreements expire on May 22, paving the way for a potential lockout or strike. A week before that, on May 15, recommendations are due to be delivered by William Kaplan, head of an Industrial Inquiry Commission that heard submissions in January on the fate of Canada Post, whose budget is in crisis and whose mandate is arguably doomed by society’s shift from paper to digitized information. In February, Canada Post laid off approximately 50 management employees, calling its financial situation “critical” and its current losses “increasingly unsustainable.” That followed earlier executive layoffs and a $1-billion dollar loan from the federal government announced in January. Now, with collective agreements set to expire, the 55,000 postal workers who were on strike in December might find themselves back in the same position, fighting layoffs with a strike mandate. Some banks have started notifying customers that a possible Canada Post strike could interrupt some of their services that rely on regular mail. “We know this ongoing uncertainty is challenging for your business,” Canada Post said in a statement to customers. “We had hoped new agreements would be reached by this point — and providing you with this certainty remains our priority. We will make every effort to be transparent and let you know if there is a risk of a labour disruption.” “It’s no secret that this has been a challenging round of bargaining for all of us,” said Jan Simpson, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers in an update on the bargaining. “Yet, through it all, the Union has held strong towards achieving its goal: securing good collective agreements that provide workers with fair wages, health and safety protections, job security, and the right to retire with dignity.” “Canada Post is in steep decline,” said Ian Lee, associate professor in the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, who worked in finance for Canada Post in the 1980s and is a prominent advocate for wholesale reform. “Even then, there were a lot of post offices that were losing a lot of money,” he said. But the problems have grown worse, and they are accelerating. Since the high water mark of delivering 5.5 billion letters in 2006, Canada Post has seen a decline in that number every year. Canada Post’s workforce has not declined at anywhere near a similar pace, such that it is now “hemorrhaging cash,” Lee said. The government loan simply “kicked the can down the road.” Now that they have caught up to it, and with the union and management in “irreconcilable” positions about cost reductions, a strike looks likely. This has been building for years. Canada Post’s parcel service lost market share to increased competition since the pandemic, Lee said, and the ad mail service is small but comparatively healthy. The letters are in precipitous decline, though, which Lee said calls into the question the very project of having mail carriers walk past the same homes every weekday, regardless if each has new mail. He said the union is in “deep denial” about the collapsing business. If trends continue, and letter mail continues as just the preference of the elderly, as Lee put it, then in a few years letter mail will “essentially vanish.” “There’ll be no mail to deliver,” he said. “Their only hope is to reinvent themselves as a parcel post company.” For international comparison, Canadians often look to the Royal Mail in Britain, which like the Netherlands has a publicly traded national postal service that was spun out from a state owned one. But Lee said the closer comparison is with the United States, especially given that both North American countries span five time zones, whereas Britain and the Netherlands are smaller and denser. The U.S. Postal Service is in similar trouble to Canada Post, Lee said. It has been pursuing a cost cutting program, but says in recent a financial statement that it needs “further administrative and legislative reform.”

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• Matthew Lau: The only way to save Canada Post is to privatize it

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