Who's Driving Canada Post Into the Ground?

It’s been a year since I wrote Preparing for Canada Post's Imminent Collapse. Granted, by at least some definitions of the word “collapse”, my prophecy has yet to materialize. Although when you add the coming strike to the 32 day labour disruption from late last year, junk mail-free days may well end up outnumbering junk mail deliveries for the foreseeable future.

The truth is that I don’t enjoy thinking about Canada Post and its troubles. I rarely use the service myself and reading through their annual reports and external analyses can be downright depressing. The Crown corporation, in its current form, is unable to escape a combination of a letter delivery market destroyed by email and other digital technologies, a parcel delivery space where they just can’t compete, and labour costs unconnected to business value.

Here's one interesting illustration of the problem. As of 2025, it's reasonable to assume that Canada Post’s share of the total home delivery market in Canada is at most 20 percent.¹ Based on available information, the workload is handled by around 55,000 unionized employees. By contrast, the other 80 percent of the country’s deliveries arrive through the efforts of just 77,000 workers designated by Statistics Canada as "couriers and messengers" - which includes "local messengers and local delivery".

Without claiming this incredible disparity is necessarily the fault of any one party, the current post office model is obviously irredeemably inefficient.

So I figured I’d already published my final thoughts on the matter. But a vendor with whom I do business sent one of those “in case of postal interruption” warnings that also included a link to a fascinating resource. It seems that back in December 2024 - in the heat of the previous round of nastiness - the Minister of Labour appointed William Kaplan as Industrial Inquiry Commissioner with a mandate to convene hearings, examine the facts on the ground, and submit a report with recommendations for resolving the impasse.

Sometime over the past few weeks that report appeared, and Canada Post has added both the 162 page report itself and their own five page summary to their site. At a first glance - and acknowledging that this is the corporation’s representation of the report - that summary makes the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) look really bad. According to the summary, despite the corporation’s existential financial crisis, CUPW continues to demand pay increases and greater job security.

Specifically, CUPW refuses to consider removing devastating restrictions on:

• assigning existing employees additional work when they have finished their assigned tasks - a problem known as “trapped time”

• the ability to hire part time workers to account for dynamic service demands and the need for seven-day-a-week parcel delivery

In fact, the summary does seem to accurately reflect the thrust of the full report. In Kaplan’s own words, the union incorrectly claims:

“that Canada Post’s financial situation has been manufactured for tactical reasons or that the Government of Canada announcement of the $1 billion-plus lifeline loan in January 2025 was strategically timed and not a real necessity”

He also writes that “the notion that the January 2025 $1 billion-plus loan/lifeline will be repaid requires the complete suspension of disbelief.”

Kaplan further notes how: