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Canada Post handed out $30.8M in management bonuses in 2025 despite $1.57B deficit
Canada Post gave out $30.8 million in bonuses to its management employees in 2025, according to disclosure provided to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
The Crown corporation’s president and CEO Doug Ettinger conceded in an appearance before the committee on June 18 that it lost $1.57 billion in 2025, but he insisted it was a bad year due to “labour disruptions” of 220 days. And he suggested the “real deficit” was “closer to a billion.” (The $1.57 billion was admitted to in Canada Post’s 2025 annual report .)
Ettinger didn’t mention the a $1.03 billion federal government bailout in early 2025. Or another $1.01 billion given to Canada Post by Ottawa in February 2026 as a “short-term financial bridge.”
The situation has drawn criticism from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“If Canada Post is taking taxpayer-funded bailouts, then there’s no way its managers and executives should be showering themselves with bonuses,” said Franco Terrazzano, the CTF’s federal director in a July 14 statement .
During his appearance before the government operations committee, Ettinger said he didn’t have the bonus figures, and promised to provide them to the committee at a later date.
Instead, Ettinger noted that Canada Post is undergoing an historic transformation, previously reported by National Post . He said the “at risk” bonus program provides the bonuses that were part of the compensation for 7,000 employees, including management and frontline supervisors.
He said he was “los(ing) sleep over keeping the good people that are with us … It’s not an executive program per se. It’s a program through the organization. Administrators and assistants are part of the program.”
He defended the “at risk” bonuses by citing that Canada Post has “cut a lot of costs on the management side. We’ve taken out more than 10 per cent from our management and executive.”
He stated “the corporate team incentive hasn’t paid a dime since 2011.”
He added that the guaranteed pension program is gone, replaced by a defined contribution plan. He also has a DC pension plan. (Though, according to government documents, he earns a base salary in the CEO 8 pay band, which ranges from $506,800 to $596,200 annually.)
And Ettinger noted the corporation also “took over 200 million over the last two years out of the discretionary travel budget,” he said.
The CTF says it filed an access-to-information request for Canada Post’s 2025 bonus records on Feb. 23, 2026.
“The Crown corporation refused to release bonus records for months until members of parliament forced the Crown corporation to disclose the records to the parliamentary committee,” says the CTF in its statement.
Canada Post has lost money for eight consecutive years, totalling about $5.4 billion, notes the CTF. “It’s infuriating that Crown corporation executives think they are entitled to bonuses when they’re hemorrhaging money and relying on taxpayer handouts,” Terrazzano said.
In a May 2025 report, the Industrial Inquiry Commission suggested Canada Post was facing an “existential crisis.” It was already “effectively insolvent, or bankrupt,” and without immediate action “its fiscal situation will continue to deteriorate.”
The CTF points to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, VIA Rail and Alto, the federal Crown corporation that oversees the government’s high-speed rail project, as other Crown corporations that have handed out millions of dollars in bonuses, despite underperforming.
“About 98 per cent of all government executives took a bonus in 2024-25, the last year where data is available,” says the CTF. “Meanwhile, federal departments met just 54 per cent of their performance targets that year.”
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