The Political Stunt That Killed Canada Post’s Last Chance at Relevance

The most short-sighted political stunt that I saw during my time in Ottawa happened in 2015 in the months before the election that would end my time in the Stephen Harper government. The impact of this stunt, and the dumb policy that surrounded it, is still affecting the country a decade later, so it is worthy of a short case study. The stunt emanated from the strange political alliance of third-party leader Justin Trudeau and his former parliamentary colleague Denis Coderre over the issue of Canada Post. Coderre had already left the House of Commons and was serving as the mayor of Montreal. Trudeau was the member of Parliament for the Montreal riding of Papineau and was preparing his run to become prime minister. In that run, Trudeau had the approach of attacking anything related to the Harper government and didn’t seem concerned about whether any of the policies were good for the country or not. This extended to the modernization plan from Canada Post, which came from the Crown corporation itself and not the government. It was supported by the Conservative government, but the case for modernization was made by Canada Post. Speaking for myself, I found the modernization plan smart and absolutely necessary.

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It is important to note at the outset that Canada Post ceased being a department of the Canadian government in 1981, when the Canada Post Corporation Act created an independently managed Crown corporation that was self-funding. This move was made after major deficits were accumulated by the department in the 1970s, and was based on the belief that independence and private-sector discipline would lead to better service and less financial exposure for the government. The decision seemed to work, because Canada Post turned its first profit since the 1950s just a few years later. Canada Post continued to show an innovative approach to mail delivery and changing consumer tastes. It began to implement community mailboxes for new suburban home developments in 1985. It acquired a controlling stake in Purolator Courier to expand parcel delivery services in 1993, and it began online billing services to try and adapt to the switch from paper bills to online payments. By the mid-2000s, however, modernization efforts to increase automation and reduce costs were not keeping pace with rapidly changing consumer habits and a massive drop in mail usage. The need to cut costs led to the outsourcing of postal outlets into retail stores and rural mail delivery to contractors. This led to continual labour frictions as employees saw the change in mail volumes but did not want to change an institution that had been viewed for generations as an essential service and a job for life. This presented major challenges for the corporation. Then chief executive officer Moya Greene had streamlined operations and had been suggesting the need to privatize the Crown corporation, but minority government politics of that time did not make it possible. C anada Post was also facing a major pension shortfall, to the tune of more than $6 billion. The Harper government had backed Canada Post on the pension issues by allowing it to operate normally without making special payments to the pension fund. After my election in late 2012, I was told by caucus colleagues that the privatization of Canada Post had not been possible a few years earlier due to the pension issue and the simple fact that Harper knew that the opposition would not have supported it in a minority Parliament. By the time Harper achieved majority in 2011, Greene was gone and leading the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom, where she successfully guided that Crown agency through privatization at an opportune time. Canada Post had missed the obvious window for privatization because of minority Parliament dynamics. By the time I joined the government as a parliamentary secretary in 2013, Canada Post was grappling with the fact that they were processing 1.4 billion fewer pieces of mail than they were just seven years earlier. Despite automation and changes made the decade before, the business model was just no longer feasible in the age of parcel delivery and instantaneous communications through email, text, and social media. Canada Post was preparing a major plan to evolve the Crown corporation to adapt to the new realities of the marketplace. It expected that it would have enough political cover to roll this out amid Harper’s majority government. At the time, I was told that alternate-day delivery was being explored as an option, along with a range of other changes to delivery practices to pivot toward the e-commerce future and more sustainable revenues. I supported the changes that were coming, because I represented a growing, largely suburban riding where most working families (like my own) had already evolved their mail habits and would check their community mailboxes only a couple of times per week. The checks would happen daily only if you were expecting a package from online purchases. It was not the Amazon Prime era we are in today. Back then, it was simple things like Mable’s Labels for the kids or L. L. Bean or other pioneering e-commerce retailers that people were ordering from. These suburban households could see, and so could Canada Post, that more of this e-commerce was coming in the future. In December 2013—just the day after the House of Commons rose for the Christmas break—Canada Post revealed its plan to adjust to the new reality of mail services. They announced major changes that were intended to stave off permanent deficits and save approximately $700 million to $900 million annually. In reality, the plan was also an effort to prevent potential bankruptcy. I said this in Ottawa and in my riding in the months after this launch when the plan became controversial. Deemed its “five-point plan to get back to profitability,” Canada Post stated that it intended to: 1. End doorstep urban delivery and transition all homes to a community mailbox model; 2. Dramatically increase the price for stamps and use tiered pricing for mail; 3. Expand retail postal outlets and close many smaller postal offices; 4. Negotiate new collective agreements for labour, including lower salaries and shift to a defined-contribution pension to limit pension liability; and 5. Streamline operations and position the company for a package future as much as possible. The move was a sound one based on the realities of the marketplace and shifts to consumer behaviour that were never going to shift back. I thought it was executed well by then CEO Deepak Chopra, who seemed to speak to the habits of families in my riding in some of his commentary about the changes. He said that he wanted Canada Post “to add value to Canadians who are leading really busy lives. From being your letter box, we want to become your shopping cart.” The plan was also supported by the responsible minister Lisa Raitt, who stressed it was important for the Crown company to be self-sufficient in a changing marketplace. For rural and suburban ridings across the country, there was not going to be any real change beyond the increase to the price of stamps. This was because 68 percent of Canadian households were already using community mailboxes and had also largely developed habits around them. It was only the older, generally affluent areas of urban centres where the community mailbox change was going to affect people’s routines. These neighbourhoods were well informed and politically powerful areas, but the reality was that the changes would have been minimal. It was unfair for 68 percent of taxpaying householders without doorstep delivery to subsidize the ability for a declining minority of generally affluent households to check their junk-mail deliveries each day before tossing them in the recycling bin. That is what was already happening in 2013/14, and it is only more severe now. (Full disclosure: I now live in Toronto with doorstep delivery and would approximate that 95 percent of what I receive is advertising flyers or junk mail.) When Parliament returned in 2014, the politics continued with opposition parties and with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers—CUPW—in particular. In fairness, it was understandable that CUPW would oppose the plan. They had good reason to be concerned for their members, but they had also backed themselves into this corner with past labour actions. They had a reputation of being a difficult union and did not want to face the commercial reality of their marketplace. The age of “jobs for life” was over, and they needed to ensure the employee pension plan was secured for existing workers and move on to a new model for younger and new workers. I would always meet with my local CUPW representative for a good discussion of the issues, but his suggestions about a return to postal banking or “wellness checks” on seniors were simply not serious proposals in my view. We needed to make real changes to adapt to consumer trends, or we were dooming Canada Post to a future of oblivion. In 2014, I received a lot of constituency correspondence on the five-point plan and the loss of doorstep delivery in the older downtown portions of my riding—in Bowmanville, Port Perry, and Uxbridge. When I say correspondence, I of course mean emails. I likely received only a handful of letters in relation to the Canada Post issue, which I always found to be such a delicious irony that I would share it with constituents whom I called on the issue. “Thanks for your email to me regarding changes Canada Post is making due to the fact that there are a billion fewer letters being sent each year because of email . . . ” When MPs receive mass emails from advocacy campaigns, they and their team prepare a standard response that goes out to people who send identical and often automated emails based on their postal code. If you sent me a form email, you would get a detailed and respectful form response from me. For those who called or emailed me organically, I would try and tailor my response to their specific questions or concerns. I took a serious approach with my response to the Canada Post issue and used an illustrative example that every single constituent I communicated with would relate to: pay phones. Pay phones were once ubiquitous in Canada—from every major street corner to all of the arenas, pools, and public buildings. Canadians of a certain age remember ten-cent and twenty-five-cent calls and “collect” calling our parents from one location or another. I even wrote one of my first blogs on the topic of the Canada Post changes and mentioned the memory of using the pay phone in the old Bowmanville Arena to call my mom after I scored my first goal. Any homeowner (generally, thirty years of age or older) in the areas impacted by the phasing out of doorstep delivery in Canada could relate to the pay-phone example. They had watched pay phones virtually disappear, and all of them had mobile phones. In the years preceding the Canada Post five-point plan, 15,000 pay phones had been removed across Canada because of the decline in their use. The internet revolution had not just impacted traditional mail, but the rise of mobile phones and digital means of communication had led to massive changes to consumer habits and the virtual extinction of the public pay phone. By 2014, there had also been a significant decline in the use of home landline phones as well. Today, the majority of Canadian homes do not have a landline and rely completely on their mobile phones for communication. People saw this happening around them, and it could be connected easily to the challenges Canada Post was facing. When I provided a detailed answer to constituents using the pay-phone example to justify the Canada Post five-point plan, almost all of them understood the move. I told them I was in public office to be straight up with people even when it was difficult. While I cannot say most of them changed their minds, I certainly know that all of them acknowledged the fact that Canada Post could not ignore the reality of changing consumer habits. Unfortunately, too many MPs would not rationally consider the issues in the same way most of my constituents did. Many of the emails to me would also copy the general contact line for Canada Post or its CEO, who, I was very impressed to see, responded personally to a few of them. He even sent me a note saying he liked the example I was using in my responses. That was a sign of great leadership. While opposition parties would attack him for his awkward, albeit well-intentioned, comment about community mailboxes helping seniors “get their exercise,” I think he was an excellent senior Crown official trying to serve the public good. I was disappointed that politics descended upon his rational plan and earnest efforts to avoid the position that Canada Post is in now. He deserved better, and so did Canadians. Getting back to the premise of my essay and the worst stunt I saw in my time in politics. While the Liberals were initially only mildly critical in their response to the five-point plan, this tune would change over the next eighteen months as the CUPW became more aggressive and some of the large urban mayors began to criticize the move. Considering that most urban MPs were Liberals or New Democrats, there was also growing competition between the two parties on the centre left. Aggressiveness on the issue in late 2014 and early 2015 was best embodied by Montreal mayor Denis Coderre. Ironically, he had resigned as MP just a few months before Canada Post unveiled its five-point plan, so he should have been the most informed Canadian mayor on the challenges the corporation was facing. Rather than leverage his experience as a former MP and minister of the Crown, Coderre preferred to play politics in harmony with his former colleagues in Ottawa. He was very vocal in his criticism of the Canada Post plan and even made the decision for the city of Montreal to join the CUPW legal action against the changes in federal court. 2015 was an election year, so the rhetoric from the Liberal Party and its leader also began to heat up. Seemingly ignoring the fact that his father’s government had made the changes so Canada Post could be a self-sufficient Crown corporation in 1981, Trudeau decried the fact that Canada Post was becoming a “profit-making enterprise.” His language made it seem like mail delivery was still the responsibility of the federal government, and he vowed to restore this “proper service” for Canadians if he became prime minister. The Liberal Party platform from 2015 included his pledge to save doorstep mail delivery. Ironically, this pledge was included in a section that began with the line: “[i]n a digital era, Canadians have high standards for the service they receive.” It was the digital era, after all, that the five-point plan was meant to address. The “jump the shark” moment for Trudeau and Coderre happened when the Montreal mayor moved from legal to illegal action in his crusade against the Canada Post changes. Just days after the 2015 election was called surprisingly early by Prime Minister Harper, Coderre—hard hat on his head—showed up to a press conference in the Pierrefonds neighbourhood with a jackhammer. Surrounded by local officials and dozens of media cameras and reporters, Coderre proceeded to use the construction tool to destroy the concrete slab recently laid by Canada Post in preparation for the installation of a community mailbox. In what could only be viewed as a bad joke or an angry attack, here was an elected official destroying public property in front of cameras to make a political point. To make things worse, a few weeks later, Trudeau stood beside the mayor at a press conference and made light of Coderre’s actions by saying only that, as prime minister, he would “work to restore mail service to Canadians who expect it to be a proper service from their government and not a profit-making enterprise.” That was it. The craziest political stunt I saw in my decade of public life. A former Liberal MP breaking the law with a jackhammer in front of cameras and a candidate for prime minister of Canada essentially endorsing those actions. We all know what happened in the days, weeks, and years after the jackhammer was turned off. The Liberals won the election, and Trudeau became prime minister. After a brief police investigation, the Crown decided not to proceed with criminal charges against Coderre. He was, however, rejected by Montrealers in the next election. Trudeau later also waffled on his 2015 pledge. He halted the expansion of community mailboxes to areas with doorstep service, but he did not restore doorstep service to all areas that had lost it as he had promised he would. The Liberals had also promised to study the wider issue of Canada Post reform, but that process was more of a sideshow than anything serious. The parliamentary committee report on this study ended up being a dog’s breakfast of whimsical recommendations to “explore” “community hubs” and Canada Post delivering “digital communications” to rural areas, but there were a few nuggets of reality in the report that sounded a lot like elements of the five-point plan. I particularly liked recommendation thirty-one, which stated: Canada Post work at being competitive in the parcel delivery area and utilize its distribution network and last mile delivery services to its advantage, when working with its competitors . . .  Today, Canada Post is facing the existential crisis that was forecast back in 2013. They are seeing letter mail continue to decline, and they have been losing more and more parcel delivery work to independent contractors for Amazon and other e-commerce companies. The current facts and figures surrounding Canada Post are grim: • Since 2017, it has lost $3 billion. • In 2025, the government had to provide $1 billion in special funding to keep the Crown corporation solvent. • At least $1 billion in government subsidy is expected to be required every year beginning in 2026. • Over the past twenty years, 3 million new addresses have been added to Canada Post’s delivery mandate. • Over the same period, letter mail declined by over 3 billion pieces per year, giving Canada Post less revenues to help their efforts to serve 3 million new homes. And the slab that was destroyed by Denis Coderre in 2015? It was rebuilt and installed in 2018. RIP Canada Post. Political stunts and posturing failed you. Adapted from “Jackhammers, Jokers and the End of Canada Post” by Erin O’Toole (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.The post The Political Stunt That Killed Canada Post’s Last Chance at Relevance first appeared on The Walrus.