Well, here we are. The government has announced Canada Post will no longer deliver door-to-door. 

The news was greeted with yet another national strike by CUPW, the second in less than a year. 

Sort of a “you can’t fire me because I quit” scenario. 

Like the first, which started in November, just as the Christmas shopping season was getting underway, the current strike promises to last weeks. Maybe months. 

The Gazette signed on in 2023 for Canada Post delivery via its unique Neighbourhood Mail service. Its databases map every address in the County. It can target and pinpoint in every direction. They determine exactly how many copies of the paper are required to hit every address, both residential and commercial. Fleets of trucks, sorters and carriers reliably delivered the newspaper to every one of the seven post offices in PEC, and from there to every mailbox. 

Canada Post has enviable infrastructure. Bricks and mortar post offices, as well as locked mailboxes for clustered addresses in hamlets, towns, and villages. And excellent workers. We felt beautifully taken care of, week after week. 

At first. 

Inner dysfunction, partly a response to pernicious economic forces, means Canada Post is increasingly unable to put its grand national network to any use. 

In part, of course, it is a calamity of the digital age; its fortunes over the last decade precision map the problems facing real things in real life. 

First there’s just the internet itself. Why send a letter when you can send an email? 

When it comes to sending or receiving a package, though, an event which must take place not on the internet — alas — but through actual physical means, you’d think that Canada Post’s infrastructure would have given it an advantage where the action in delivery service these days really is, in parcels. 

But Amazon transformed that playing field a decade ago, in part by making it as easy to get something delivered in real life as it was to click and buy it. 

To do this, Amazon imported a business model into Canada that kneecaps our historic Crown Corporation, known for utter reliability, a consistent network structure, and for excellent jobs. The average carrier wage  is between $22 and $32 an hour. Plus benefits.

Amazon, in contrast, is a global empire that subcontracts fleets of badly paid gig workers subject to notoriously grueling working conditions, and easily hired and fired en masse in response to seasonal demands. 

So essential is exploitation to its business model, in January, just as Canada Post’s workers were being forced back to work after their attempt to strike, Amazon closed all seven of its service centres in Quebec, firing 1900 employees and making redundant a further 2000 subcontracted workers. 

That was its response to 287 workers at a single delivery center forming a union. Sort of an “I fire you and I quit” scenario.

The world of free or very cheap stuff the internet promotes, alongside free and practically immediate delivery to every possible location under the sun, comes at the cost of fair labour practices. 

There is no other way to pay for ultra-cheap goods and immediate delivery than by not paying for them. 

But here’s the thing. It is hard for anyone who believes in the basic principle of protecting decent jobs in the time of big tech to watch the Canadian Union of Postal Workers destroy Canada Post. 

While Amazon’s exploitation of subcontracted and temporary workforces has led, of course, to enormous profits — Jeff Bezos enjoyed a $75 million wedding in Venice this summer — the Crown Corporation would be happy just to break even. 

In 2024, its seventh straight year of losses, the company was $841 million in the red. 

Between 2018 and the second quarter of 2025, the losses total more than $4.2 billion. 

The union, however, refuses to read the writing on the wall. It goes to the point of saying that the $1 billion the government advanced in January to keep Canada Post afloat after years of losses and the disastrous Christmas-time strike is just political theatre.

The series of strikes, or even just threats to strike, in the past year have of course only made things worse. Small businesses like the Gazette are being forced to leave because Canada Post is now totally unreliable. 

Most recently, on Friday, September 12, at 4 in the afternoon, just as I was starting to think about the weekend ahead, I received an email telling me the paper we were working on would not be delivered.

In the face of rotating job actions, we have had to find other ways to get the paper into your hands, generally involving a great deal of scrambling at the last minute.

We promise our advertisers we will deliver. Like myriad small businesses across Canada, we can no longer afford either the financial or reputational risk of relying on Canada Post. 

So, what is going on? After the Ministry of Labour intervened in the Christmas strike to order workers back to work, it appointed William Kaplan, a well-known labour and employment lawyer, to head an Inquiry Commission charged with producing an impartial  report on Canada Post’s operations. 

That report, delivered in May, detailed the financial situation — the company, it says, is “effectively insolvent” — and made a series of recommendations to promote its survival in today’s parcel delivery marketplace. 

Those include flexible, part-time staff, and requiring employees to work the hours for which they are paid, in part by introducing “dynamic routing,” which adapts assigned routes to daily mail and parcel volumes. At the moment, routes are fixed. If it takes just six hours one day, carriers still get paid for eight.

The report is balanced, sympathetic, and detailed. The government’s announcement this month that it would end door-to-door letter delivery in favour of community mailboxes and shut redundant suburban post offices enacts some of its basic recommendations. The others, however, will require the cooperation of the union. Of that, however, Kaplan writes, 

“CUPW has an immediate choice: continue to adhere to objectively debunked claims about Canada Post’s financial state — and the challenges facing letter mail and parcel delivery — or acknowledge that Canada Post’s financial situation requires an immediate pivot to its overall bargaining approach. 

“It must … accept that Canada Post does not exist to provide CUPW members with employment. It exists for one reason: to deliver letter mail and parcels to the people of Canada.”