Letter: Canada Post is a necessary service, not a business

On Oct. 16, 1981, the federal Parliament passed the “Canada Post Corporation Act”, which transformed Canada Post into a Crown Corporation to create the Canada Post Corporation (CPC). The legislation also included a measure legally guaranteeing basic postal service to all Canadians.

Nice try but as we here in B.C. know from our ferry corporation — transforming a public service to a Crown corporation is an excellent means to allow profit creep to intrude on our thinking. The language we hear from Joël Lightbound, minister responsible for Canada Post, is the language of business. The Canada Post Corporation despite being viewed as a business is not a business, it is a public service which typically should be funded as a vital national asset. The outlook that the service has an overrun of $10 million a day, which obligates the government to ‘bail out’ Canada Post, is based on the notion that this is a ‘for profit’ business or rather should be.

Whether we are talking about our healthcare system, our public education system, or Canada Revenue, these operations are there for two reasons: to provide a necessary and crucial amenity for our needs and employ our people with meaningful, well compensated positions.

While times have changed, it is well within the abilities of our public service to pivot and manage this change without diminishing the service itself or the employment prospects.

It is high time our postal service was returned to being managed by our civil service employees rather than an overcompensated board of directors. We don’t hear about overruns requiring ‘bail outs’ when we are regaled with plans to vastly raise the cost of military spending — the $10 million a day they claim to be ‘losing’ is in fact the cost of running this amenity.

There are other options to sustain the usefulness of our postal system. The good people of CUPW have for years been urging that very board of directors to expand the mandate of our postal system to include postal banking services — which many countries including the UK, France, Japan, Italy and Brazil have in place as did Canada Post under its Post Office Savings Bank until 1968.

Frankly I think many of us would find such a modification appealing when you look at the state of banking practises ordinary people must navigate.

The business community would do well to consider the high cost of mailing documents and packages within the private sector when they run their ideological campaigns against publicly provided services but right-wing uncoordinated business practice gets the nod.

The Canada Post Corporation is not running deficits, it is underfunded and poorly managed by a team of rich folks. There are 55,000 people who work hard to deliver our mail and coincidentally the payroll for those people is approximately $10 million a day — every penny goes back out to our communities for all the necessities those people need to sustain their families. Ask yourself if our postal workers are worth their average basic wage of $25/hour and then ask if the directors whose salaries range from $238,000 to $700,000 are doing a good job at running this service.

Our postal workers deserve better and so do we!

If we want to get a grip on this reality consider the fact that the military budget currently being shopped about by the Carney Liberals will cost the people of Canada over $3 billion a week. I would far rather have my lovely letter carrier hand me my mail with a smile than be the proud owner of a pile of armaments we absolutely do not need.

Eden Haythornthwaite

Cowichan Valley