Scott Stinson: The Justin Trudeau policy that Mark Carney should end
Canada Post appears to be nearing the end of door-to-door delivery. It is about damn time.
By: Scott Stinson
There was a time, back in the more innocent days of 2014 or so, when the federal Liberal party made a big show about believing in evidence and science and things of that nature.
Under the still-nascent leadership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberals talked an excellent game about how Stephen Harper’s governing Tories were foolishly favouring ideology over facts. They had some ammunition in that regard: the Tories had taken a hatchet to the long-form census, and there were cuts to all kinds of academic research and climate science, plus the government had stopped allowing federal scientists to speak about their work, preferring all media inquiries to go through political staff.
Liberal promises to reverse all this stuff, and to usher in an era where the data and evidence would lead them to the optimal decisions, found a receptive audience in the public service and the media.
And then Trudeau stopped the rollout of community mailboxes to replace door-to-door mail delivery.
For me, it was the new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss moment. There was simply no rational basis for maintaining door-to-door delivery, not when the use of letter mail was dropping sharply in the internet age, blowing a hole in Canada Post’s efficiency and forcing taxpayers to subsidize the service at ever-increasing levels.
There was a political justification for it, of course: door-to-door delivery was still the norm in a lot of urban areas, where the Liberals were especially popular, and it had a lot of support among seniors, an important voting demographic. The media didn’t have to work very hard to produce stories that quoted retirees who were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to collect their Old Age Security cheques if it involved walking two streets over to a community mailbox.
“Stephen Harper is asking Canadians to pay more for less service,” Trudeau said in the 2015 election campaign. “That is unacceptable.”
The new Trudeau government didn’t actually restore home delivery to those who had lost it under the Tory cuts — which had been the promise — but it did preserve the status quo.
Until, maybe, now.
A federal commission last spring recommended ending door-to-door delivery, noting that the service was increasingly costly, which is a problem when the Crown corporation is, as the report said, “effectively insolvent.” Ottawa keeps having to extend it billion-dollar lifelines just so it can pay its bills (and wages). The Carney government has repeatedly signalled that it will take this advice on board, but not until last week did Canada Post make official that it will end home delivery to the areas — now just one third of the country — that still receive it.
The postal union, CUPW, was, not surprisingly, displeased. It said it will “continue to fight back against cuts to the postal service” and also that “this is not the right time to consult.” I do not think CUPW will ever believe it is the right time to discuss such changes.
For Mark Carney and the Liberals, this will be an interesting litmus test. There are plenty of thorny questions about the future of Canada Post, which mostly exists now to deliver flyers and other ad mail, all of it heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, but ceasing to deliver door-to-door is such an obvious first step that it is bizarre it has taken this long for the formal steps to begin.
And yet, here was a CBC story published last week with the classic scare headline: “Eastern Ontarians worried as Canada Post considers cutting door-to-door delivery”.
Oh, dear. It quotes a local councillor who fears that residents may not be able to access community mailboxes and will go without “cheques” and “medical information.” Yikes! Sounds bad!
There has also been pushback from new NDP leader Avi Lewis, who disparages the very idea that Canada Post should not lose boatloads of money because, he says, mail is an essential service.
“Does the ambulance service make money? Do the police services make money?,” Lewis said during a CBC interview. “We’re talking about a fundamental public service.”
At which point, one has to ask: He knows about email, right?
I am stating the obvious here, but most of the country already uses community mailboxes and manages to deal with it. It is an inconvenience to have home delivery removed, speaking as someone who still has a lonely, unused mailbox next to his front door, but you get used to it. CUPW has also gone on strike enough that we’ve all had to figure out the workarounds like e-billing. I rarely wander over to the super-mailbox more than once a week, and it’s not uncommon to go multiple weeks without checking it. When I do, it is invariably a pile of flyers and, maybe, one or two pieces of mail that were actually worth receiving. I am certain I’m not alone in this regard.
There really shouldn’t be much pushback to the idea of ending home delivery, but we’ve already seen that Carney will get some anyway. I’m curious to see how he handles it.
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I’ve never had door to door postal service since I left home in 1975, yet politicians still drag out the old line “ people won’t be able to survive” with out this service. All of it is total BS. The post office is a dead man walking no matter what politicians say.
This is a great example of what makes me pessimistic about Canada’s long-term future. How are we going to be able to tackle and accomplish the things that really need to get done (infrastructure, housing) when there’s been decades of dithering over something that should have been obvious?