CUPW has announced an immediate strike, and postal workers are currently walking off the job.
The minister of public works, Joel Lightbound, has announced his intentions to implement all of the recommedations laid out in the Kaplan report, including permanently ending door-to-door delivery and the requirement to deliver mail 5 days a week.
Not sure how he expected labour to respond to 1/3 of the workforce being made redundant.
A postal service is a service. As in, it exists to benefit the citizenry, and for no other reason. A profit margin was never meant to be a part of that.
Bring Canada Post back into being 100% a crown corporation again. Make its mandate to be a service centre, and not a profit/revenue centre.
It is a crown corporation. I guess you want (and I wan it too) to be a brought back as a federal government department.
At some point, that’s just lighting money on fire.
I disagree. Why do we need to burn billions of dollars a year, in funds that could be better allocated to health care, building hospitals, education, whatever else, fighting opioid addictions, crime, green infrastructure investment, I could go on and on.
Or you know, we could spend that cash to continue to perpetuate something that’s obviously pretty broken, only to continue to flood everyone with piles of window washing advertisements and Subway coupons.
But what about the elderly, you ask? Whelp, Grandma is going to have to figure out how to get her bills electronically, and how email works. If you want to send or receive postcards, etc., you probably don’t need instant gratification for that. You can wait for a week, and pick it up at the community box. Let Canada Posts ownership of Purolator take care of the packages from online shopping.
It’s time to be realistic here.
I would say buyout purelator and start a nationalised Amazon competitor.
Canada Post started it and them immediately sold it to Deloitte.
Mail has changed which is true, before physical mail funded the whole thing, now things need to be changed.
I don’t get why we can’t have a system where if you receive CPP or disability payments or something else, you can register with Canada Post to have home delivery but others don’t get it or pay to have it?
Why do we need to burn billions of dollars a year, in funds that could be better allocated to health care, building hospitals, education, whatever else, fighting opioid addictions, crime, green infrastructure investment, I could go on and on.
Zero-sum arguments are the Overton window that the wealthy and powerful have permitted you to debate within. The premise you bring forth here is both ridiculous and intellectually insulting, not the least because it wouldn’t even be an issue if the wealthy just paid their fair share.
Do better.
Grandma is going to have to figure out how to get her bills electronically
With what? No computer, no clue how to use one, no real ability to learn, requiring dozens of hours of professional instruction to get the simplest workflows which are forgotten within a few days of non-use, constantly at risk of scams and phishing because she has absolutely no experience with the Internet, and absolutely no interest in learning when she’s already 95% done her lifespan and has difficulty even remembering what day of the week it is.
It’s like you being forced to spend outrageous amounts of money on an electric car simply because someone else decided to stop all gasoline production and distribution in Canada.
Fact is, everyone deserves to have access to all traditional communication, be it phones (you pay for that) or Internet (you also pay for that), or snail mail (also, paid for). We need a fundamental mode of communication that is not restricted to a privileged class simply because they can afford it, and whom everyone can make use of with almost zero resources.
That’s the written word, on paper, passed along via a public service that exists to enrich everyone, and not just those who are already fantastically wealthy.
Some sums are zero. Federal spending, once whatever debt accumulation is factored out, is one of them. Pretending it’s not is what happened to Greece.
Why do I need to “do better,” when I have an opinion? You may not agree, and I respect that. A good debate here is how we can progress as a society when it comes to issues like this. Hurling insults at each other doesn’t do that. I understand you may be personally affected by this, like I mean no disrespect or it’s not like I lack compassion for that, I have compassion. But I’m also a realist, we cannot just endlessly burn cash like this on these crown corps because people can’t adjust to new realities. That’s not a so called rich person perspective either, it’s again, a realist one.
Capital is not endless, we do not want to turn into the United States, where we endlessly face government funding shutdowns and unfathomable defecit spending because we shred money like they do. It’s important we run our assets efficiently, and when you are burning billions a year on mainly delivering junk mail to people, it’s kind of mind boggling. That’s not zero sum, it’s common sense. Bills only come (usually) but once a month, if you need to correspond with someone, why does that need to be delivered every day, individually, with hand to hand service?
I’m not for the complete elimination of snail mail either, it still needs to exist. They’ve laid out a path for it to exist, but it’s going to necessarily look a lot different than we are used to it looking. It’s the logical path forward.
Instead of having a post office like a real country, let’s just put all our letters on a big table in the centre of Canada and everyone can go there and rummage around when they need to send or receive anything. This will allow us to afford the necessary financial bailout of the federal government by saving up to $4 a year per Canadian.
Omg Winnipeg-centric messaging, like the good ole days 🥰🥰🥰
Wait, they’re still in a budget hole after this plan? That’s some union!
(Canada Post is on track to cost 1.5 billion over costs in 2025, so almost $40 for each of the 40ish million Canadians including children etc.)
Pretty expensive. If only they could come up with some way to count it as military spending it wouldn’t be a problem.
I’m not sure how the Postal service could be used to help our friends in Ukraine or deter Russian aggression in Europe, but open to suggestions!
I don’t mind waiting for my mail. I just hope everyone can keep their job. It’s hard enough these days, being unemployed would be terrible.
I’m torn. I don’t want anyone to lose their jobs but I don’t love subsidizing reasonably expensive jobs that don’t provide much in surplus value compared to say, teachers, nurses, firefighters etc, all of whom we desperately need.
I get that perspective, but I also don’t think it’s fair for our government to reduce the level of service Canadians should expect from our public post office while simultaneously pumping ungodly amounts of money into private LNG, mining, and electric vehicle companies.
Postal service is very different from everything else you listed. The reason we’re pumping so much money into those is that money should act as a significant multiplier for creating jobs and moving money through tbe economy.
Subsidizing the Post, while creating a better service doesn’t have the same sort of multiplier benefit, other than the Keynesian hole digging style of employment.
I may not love the climate effects of some of these projects but from a “will these employ people and get a decent amount of money closing through the economy”, the answer is pretty definitively yes.
Allowing people to live in remote parts of the country and still be connected is an essential service
Rural communities already overwhelmingly use community post boxes. If the proposed changes really disadvantage rural folks, then that’ll be something to change.
Don’t get your hopes up because budget cuts aren’t subsidizing them either
Most of those are handled provincially and I can’t speak for other provinces but BC at least is using federal transfer ms (which budget cuts elsewhere help fund) to help hire more nurses and firefighters.
They haven’t really been doing door to door deliveries anyway.
Mark Carney is failing Canada.
If he’s failing Canada, just think about how bad PP and his small penis syndrome would be failing us. How do you think he’d be dealing with all of this? Putting out passive aggressive one liner insults on Twitter and LinkedIn?
We don’t live in a two party state, believe it or not.
“Oh, but only two parties had a chance of winning!”
Except in the previous two elections we gave the NDP enough power to hold the Liberals back from their worst tendencies to such an extent that people convinced themselves that they weren’t financially regressive shitheads, so I really don’t want to hear it.
The NDP isn’t even an option at the moment though, nor is the Green Party really. The NDP imploded and is now a mess. They can’t even get their own internal stuff sorted out, let alone be cohesive enough to run a country at a moment like this.
Like it or not (and I don’t really either for the record), for right now, it’s a two party situation. We shall see what the future holds.
The NDP isn’t even an option at the moment though
They were at the time of election. It was not a two party situation, that’s just a lie people are telling themselves to soothe the foolish decision they allowed themselves to be tricked into making.
When you consider that all of the other parties less than, seven percent of the total seats, this so-called lie becomes less of a lie and a bit more the reality of the situation.
Except, once again, the last two elections resulted in a strong enough NDP to stop the Liberal’s worst instincts. To such an extent that people were able to lie to themselves that the good things that came from those governments were the products of the Liberals and not NDP pressure.
So how did that situation end for the NDP then? I agree it was quite the unique situation, and it was kind of neat to see honestly. But how did that all end for the NDP?
Plot spoiler: not well.
You forgot to add “… slower than the alternative”
