‘Holiday season is already lost’: Calgary small businesses hit hard by Canada Post strike

Small businesses have been through challenge after challenge, from digging their way out of the pandemic to dealing with labour shortages and rising costs, and now an extended postal strike.

Mediation efforts in talks between Canada Post and its striking workers have been suspended with both sides remaining “far apart on critical issues” in a work stoppage that has now lasted 13 days.

For small business owners like Connor Curran, and his online clothing business Local Laundry, it is supposed to be the busiest and most profitable time of the year.

“(It) couldn’t come at a worse time of the year,” says Curran. “I feel like small businesses, and Canadians as a whole, are being used as a pawn.”

He says his company has had to contact customers and let them know of longer wait times, and in some cases, additional costs that will be passed down from alternate carriers.

Like many business owners, he’s had to pivot and source out other methods of shipping. But Curran says it still doesn’t account for the 40 per cent of businesses he can’t ship to.

“One of the things that Canada Post does, that no other carrier can do, is deliver to rural areas,” he says. “If you have an address with a PO box, there’s not a single other carrier that will deliver that.”

Ruhee Ismail-Teja is with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and says the pain is being felt right across the city’s small business community.

“We think about retailers who are actually distributing their goods, but it’s also impacting people who are waiting on payments and cheques, and being able to clear a backlog of parcels,” she says.

Canada Post said this week it is dealing with a backlog of 10 million parcels.

It’s something that Ismail-Teja says could lead to customers losing trust and satisfaction with the small businesses they are dealing with.

“While we know that businesses are not to blame, people inherently get frustrated when their package is late,” she says.

“We’ve seen a number of strikes related to supply chains causing disruption, but 80 per cent small businesses in Canada rely on Canada Post for shipping, invoicing, receiving payments.”

Curran says it will be hard to move forward with Canada Post after the strike because businesses needs reliability.

The federal government says it is not planning to intervene to resolve the labour dispute at Canada Post, even with less than a month to go before Christmas.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon said sending the matter to binding arbitration “is not in the cards,” even though he invoked that authority only a few weeks ago to resolve the ports dispute and a few months ago to resolve the rail dispute.

“Every dispute is different, but here the issues are fundamental. The issues are around a transformed business model for the corporation,” MacKinnon said in French.

Around 55,000 workers are on the picket line calling for a “fair wage” and better working conditions, which Canada Post insists will add heavy costs and create inflexibility in the postal service.

Last week, Canada Post reported a loss of $315 million before tax in the third quarter of 2024. It attributed the loss to a 0.6 per cent drop in parcels compared to the same period in 2023, representing six million pieces.

With files from The Canadian Press