Canada Post Lost a Record $1.57 Billion in 2025. So What?

How should we talk about Canada Post? For many Canadians, the conversation might start with complaints about its clunky online system or waiting forever in line at a service point, likely tucked away inside a Shoppers Drug Mart. For some, there will be no debate at all as they question why we even need a postal service in the era of email, Amazon, and four-wheeled—and sometimes two—gig workers dashing about delivering meals and sundries while our community postal box fills up with junk mail. Like so much of life, however, the matter is more complicated than it seems.

The most recent push to reconsider Canada Post was sparked by news that it had “lost” $1.57 billion in 2025, the deepest deficit in its history. Canada Post attributed much of the loss to declining parcel deliveries as customers, concerned about the prospect of strikes and service interruptions, turned elsewhere for shipping. The deficit has since become a political opening for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, which is considering ending all door-to-door delivery, closing rural post offices, and potentially privatizing parts of the operation.

And you might think: about time. I mean, the loss sounds bad, right? And when you consider that the postal service is into the feds for billions more in repayable loans, as it’s gone at least $6 billion into the hole since 2018, well, then it sounds very bad. The loans are meant to keep the company solvent while it reforms; a long-term plan to get Canada Post back to profit or, at least, neutral. That plan implies both structural reforms to the business model itself and sorting out long-standing labour struggles between the company and its workers. In the meantime, you know what they say: a billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking real money.

As alarming as those losses may be, how we talk about them matters. Beginning with the frame of a “loss.” Yes, Canada Post is losing money. Yes, the current model may be unsustainable, designed as it was for another era. And yes, we’re living in a very different world from even a few decades ago. But none of those observations means the country no longer needs a mail service or that some version of it will not require subsidies to preserve capacity in pursuit of broader public goals.

Any serious discussion of Canada Post has to begin with those goals. The institution exists in much the same way roadworks, the civil service, or the armed forces do. That is, to perform a function we have collectively decided should not be left entirely to the market, even if the private sector might overlap with some of its activities. Canada’s post office has operated in this spirit since 1851, more than a decade and a half before Confederation. For most of its history, it was a branch of government before being converted in 1981 into a Crown corporation—a state-owned enterprise expected to balance commercial pressures with national obligations.

And the scale of those obligations is staggering. Today, Canada Post employs over 60,000 people and delivers nearly 6 billion pieces of mail and parcels each year to almost 18 million addresses across the country. Every year, the company publishes a bewildering inventory of national reach: 22,000 indoor parcel lockers, 21,400 delivery routes, and nearly 5,800 retail post offices. Those numbers tell a story: Canada Post remains woven through the country. It may no longer provide the same share of stitching that held A mari usque ad mare through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, but it still helps bind the federation together.

And yet the moment Canada Post runs a deficit, talk immediately shifts to efficiency and competitiveness. But we don’t speak that way about other arms of the state. We don’t accuse the military of losing money when it buys a tank. In fact, proponents of defence spending call such expenditures investments. In what, exactly? Well, there’s the rub. Plenty of people think we shouldn’t be ploughing tens of billions into United States–made fighter jets, but those in favour argue that the expense contributes to fundamental needs, such as protecting Canadian sovereignty and maintaining good, or good-enough-for-now, relationships with our allies (read: the United States). Perhaps that’s true, even if contestable. But when we allow ourselves to recast debates about the future, purpose, and cost of Canada Post using the same logic, we end up with a different conversation.

Canada Post is unlike the military insofar as it’s mandated by law to sustain itself financially. But that, too, is a policy choice. There’s nothing written in the heavens that dictates a Crown corporation must operate at balance or profit. We could decide tomorrow that Canada Post is an essential service for which citizens might kick in an extra $30 or $40 a year to maintain—and that would still cost a lot less than Arctic patrol missions or naval deployments.

For its part, Canada Post says it doesn’t want to be kept afloat with federal dollars it must eventually, in theory, pay back. At least that’s what the brass says. When the company reported its 2025 losses last month, the April press release noted the delivery service would have to wean itself off “taxpayer-funded cash injections.” The company would say that. Indeed, under its mandate, by law, it has to. That’s part of the difference between being a government department and a self-sustaining Crown corporation. But, again, that distinction is a choice.

Another choice is how we interpret the “labour uncertainty” and “disruption” also touched on in press releases. The fall 2025 strike over wages, working conditions, and the planned end of door-to-door delivery almost certainly cost the company both short-term revenue and long-term customers. But one might expect that the Canadian state—especially during this time of economic uncertainty, with everybody running around with elbows up—would see the value in taking care of its employees, especially those tending to a logistics and communications network that reaches nearly every household in the country. Isn’t that part of sovereignty too? Again, if that requires rethinking how we talk about Canada Post and its mandate, so be it. We’re allowed to do that.

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Nothing mentioned above implies that Canada Post shouldn’t change or be mindful with the money it spends and the way in which it operates. Of course it matters how you spend your resources. Providing good value for money is a healthy practice for public and private entities alike. Canada Post should indeed change to make the most of its potential.

Adopting postal banking, for instance, as a series of financial services, including loans, credit cards, accounts, and insurance, would be both profitable and socially useful. Maybe allowing weekend deliveries by full-time, unionized employees should be on the table too—provided the company maintains a sufficient workforce, pays its carriers well for their Saturday and Sunday labour, and doesn’t overwork them. Reducing junk mail or increasing the cost to send it isn’t a bad idea either. Let’s talk about reform, but let’s talk about it through the lens of service while accounting for the needs of workers.

The postal service, regardless of its “losses,” is still a national unifier and asset. Any Canadian individual or business can send letter mail anywhere, and it will be delivered, including for free to the House of Commons or Senate. Canada Post also delivers parcels across the country, the core of its business now, including to rural and remote locations that will never be properly served by private outlets. You can pay your taxes at a Canada Post office or send and receive money.

Indeed, we might go so far as to flip the equation. Canada Post complains that it’s not permitted to compete with private carriers because of “decades-old restrictions,” especially those that prohibit weekend deliveries. But what if we asked why we’ve allowed fly-by-night or foreign private carriers with low standards and a tendency to pay workers peanuts to dominate a service essential to private life and commerce? Who will maintain deliveries throughout the country on which we rely if it’s not profitable or easy to do so, say, during a time of political, economic, environmental, or even military crisis? In times of uncertainty or threat or war, Canada Post will be there, thoroughly Canadian, thoroughly ours, and thoroughly an entity that exists to serve national aims above all. In that light, the gutting of Canada Post seems bad—and risky to boot.

The debate over the future of Canada Post ultimately forces us to ask what we want public institutions to be for. A mandate to serve the collective good is not the same thing as a mandate to maximize the bottom line. The two may occasionally overlap, but they are not the same project. At a moment when Canadians are consumed with ideas of independence and cohesion you might expect an institution like Canada Post to stand as a rallying point: a national service owned by Canadians, accountable to Canadians, and designed to endure regardless of market turbulence or the rise and collapse of private firms blown about by economic winds.

A country needs ways to hold itself together. Sometimes, it means making sure the mail still goes through.