Professor suggests “profound culture shift” needed at Canada Post

CALGARY (660 NEWS) – With rolling strikes continuing to put mail carriers on the picket line around Canada, citizens may be concerned about the future of mail.

Canada Post is still negotiating with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, after a strike stopped deliveries on Thursday in Calgary before moving to British Columbia on Friday.

Earlier in the week, massive delays were caused by strikes in Ontario which closed off the crown corporation’s main distribution centre.

CUPW says Canada Post is not listening to their concerns over health and safety, payment to rural mail carriers and other issues.

But it’s possible this latest dispute is another symptom of the times we live in.

“Canada Post is going to have to undergo a profound culture shift,” said Ian Lee, Associate Professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University.

Lee has written several papers on Canada Post, and says one problem is they continue to treat their service as if it were the same as it was 200 years ago.

“Canada Post has to be reinvented as a valuable part of e-commerce companies.”

Lettermail continues to decline sharply — to the tune of a $123 million loss in revenue in 2017 — but parcel deliveries are rising.

CUPW contends staff are overworked as they balance traditional lettermail delivery with increased parcel drop-offs. Lee said parcels are easier to deliver, because you don’t need to service every address every day.

“An e-commerce shipper only goes to an address when they have something to take. They don’t walk to that address five days a week.”

Canada Post has an advantage, with access to over 16 million addresses around the country. However, the fact is the majority of those addresses do not need any more traditional letter mail. Along with that, most of the ones who do need it are older customers.

“So how do I put this delicately,” said Lee. “These people are going to depart from this Earth in the relatively near future, and that issue will go away.”

It’s a symptom of our digital age, Lee believes, as companies tell us to stop getting bills delivered on paper because it’s much quicker to get information sent through the internet at the speed of light.

Speaking of age, returning to employee concerns with Canada Post, the average age of employees is also going up. In 2014, CUPW reported the average age of benefit plan participants had gone up to 48.7 and the amount of incident reports are going up with them.

Right now, there are over 60,000 employees at Canada Post, with numbers dwindling. Their 2017 annual report says over 15,000 employees will leave in the following five years, and Lee said more cuts will be needed if the organization and the CUPW union can survive.

“I think that the future for CUPW is pretty bleak. Because it’s going to be a much smaller union. If Canada Post survives at all, it will be a much smaller union because you need a smaller head count to deliver e-commerce parcels. So its best days are behind it.”

Then, there are the pensions. There’s $6 billion in unfunded liability, and Lee said there could be a scenario where the government of the time rolls that pension into the much larger public service pension, which funds MP and other government pensions.

Simply put, the business of mail is changing and Canada Post could be left in the dust as people go online for more products, and continue to move away from the traditional deliveries. That would mean CUPW members lose out on benefits and market access.

“Millennial’s aren’t going to suddenly start writing gazillions of letters to mom and dad and grandpa. We’re so deep into the digital age — people with their smartphones, and social media and texting and so forth — it’s not coming back,” said Lee.

Without any sort of shift, a strange scenario would be presented.

“Where you pay 60,000 people to show up to work and drive down the streets with imaginary letters and envelopes that do not exist because nobody’s writing them anymore, and then pretend to deliver them all over the country.”

Lee said no government would support that sort of situation.

At the end of the day, it’s an uncomfortable prospect to face, but Canada Post and CUPW are working against their own customers if they stay the course and make only small adjustments.

“So Canada Post is being incrementally privatized as we speak. By whom? By all of us.”