I’m relieved that the Canada Post strike is over, but I’m not happy about it.
CP is being pulled in two directions: on the one hand, a race to the bottom where your mail gets delivered on Saturday by mistreated temp workers. On the other, a vision that includes postal banking, social services for aging in place and fair wages/meaningful careers for workers.
Given the stakes, it’s probably not unreasonable to call this a fight for the soul of the service. But it’s crazy to me that 1) a Crown corporation has management that can’t see the value in being useful to society and 2) the only way to have this conversation is through strikes.
Now, I’m by no means an expert in the postal system, but I do run Ploopy, where we ship almost everything we sell via Canadapost. And from that perspective, I have a few observations.
First, CP is the cheapest shipping service. We’ve tried the others. It’s not even close. During the strike, it cost $150 to send someone in northern British Columbia a trackball via UPS. CP will deliver the same package for $15. And while that is a particularly outrageous example, the idea that there’s a race to the bottom because CP isn’t cost competitive is a load of horse crap.
Second, no one has ever asked us whether we can have something delivered on a Saturday. And if they did, why does Saturday delivery require poorly paid temporary workers? In the standard economic logic, one typically avoids pursuing business activities that are unprofitable, particularly if one is already the lowest cost offering. But hey, what do I know about running a business?
Finally, the only reason people ever ask us to use an alternate carrier is because (no joke) the local postal service that CP hands the package off to is too corrupt/requires bribery/doesn’t work because it’s poorly run. Invariably, the courier services to these places are outrageously expensive. For example: $300 to ship a set of headphones somewhere in SE Asia. To me, this really hits the nail on the head: neglect your local postal service at your own peril.
Maybe a (utopian-ish) vision of a postal service that does more than produce value for shareholders isn’t profitable or competitive enough. As someone who thinks about the dollars and cents of running a factory a lot, I can empathize with this possibility. But nobody has actually come out and said that, and it doesn’t look like it from the outside. So why not try to build a better future?