At Canada Post’s Victoria sorting plant, manager Kevin Pearson strides onto the huge facility floor and says, “This is where it happens.” At 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, “it” means quite a lot.
Long, shiny conveyor belts snake from laser-scanning machines into the caverns of trucks and suck up packages of all shapes and sizes. The packages are whisked to a network of sorting belts, where they are directed by hand into appropriate destination bins.
In another area, employees wheel a conveyor into the back of an outgoing truck and begin filling it with packages from retailers and post offices all over Victoria. They’re on a tight deadline; the truck leaves at 5 pm, ready or not, to catch the ferry.
“We process about 7,000 packages a day here,” says Pearson above the din and bustle. “And some of those are boxes of letters, up to 300 letters per box. It’s a lot.”
Nationally, Canada Post has over 66,000 employees and serves roughly 15.5 million addresses. In 2013 alone, Canada Post delivered 3.8 billion pieces of mail, or 10.5 million parcels and letters every day. To do this, drivers clocked over 79 million kilometres, which is the equivalent of driving to Mars.
In Vancouver alone, the package depot handles 30,000 packages from retailers in Asia every single day. As a public corporation, Canada Post pays dividends to the federal government. In the last 10 years, it has contributed over $1 billion to public coffers.
But new technologies are continually redefining how we relate to one another and changing how companies like Canada Post must operate. Bills, catalogues, and bank statements are all now available in electronic versions, which has undermined an important source of revenue for Canada Post.
“The government has made it clear that it is not interested in subsidizing Canada Post,” says Pearson, “and we’ve had to adapt.”
With letter revenue declining, the corporation has begun actively shifting its focus to parcel delivery, especially from online retailers. They now deliver two out of three packages shipped within Canada.
“We were the number one Amazon carrier of choice during the Christmas season,” says Pearson. “And we delivered 95 percent of parcels on time.”
But a shift to packages means the company is cutting resources devoted to processing letters. In 2013, Canada Post announced that it would stop all home delivery of letters by 2017, routing the mail for about five million urban addresses into community mailboxes instead. This will save billions of dollars in labour, but it means the loss of a significant number of jobs.
The postal union
Janet Barney is president of the Victoria Local of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, and she’s not impressed with the changes, to say the least.
“I think it’s terrible. These cuts are totally uncalled for,” says Barney. “Financially, Canada Post has been pulling in millions of dollars in profit, 17 out of the last 18 years. So there’s no need for these cutbacks that hurt communities.”
Losing jobs and cutting services have knockdown effects throughout the community, which students will feel. The loss of door-to-door delivery means far fewer employment opportunities, especially entry-level letter-carrier positions, which are accessible jobs for students.
But Barney says the issue isn’t just loss of jobs. There are many hidden costs in stopping door-to-door delivery, since the benefits of the service, though often unnoticed, extend beyond just delivering mail.
“Letter carriers are people who have a strong sense of public service,” says Barney. “They find and rescue stray dogs. They call 911 because they know there’s something wrong with a house when the mail hasn’t been picked up in three days. They’re out there talking to people. Seniors who are alone at home, they’re waiting for you. Without door-to-door, you don’t get to know your customers, because you’re just going to a number in a box. You lose that connection with the people.”
The union believes it is ideology, not economics, that’s motivating the changes at the crown corporation.
“We think these changes are being pushed by the Harper government, and we think their ultimate plan is to privatize Canada Post,” says Barney. “They’re saying that we’re a burden to the taxpayers. But the revenue that Canada Post makes goes to fund health care and other federal programs that benefit taxpayers.”
Life as a letter carrier
Bob is a letter carrier who experiences the cuts and changes to Canada Post every day (he wished to remain anonymous for this story).
Because of the budget cutbacks, working conditions have deteriorated at the corporation, with high levels of animosity between management and unionized workers. And even though his job is being phased out, Bob says being a letter carrier is “having to do more than there is allotted time for.”
There are appealing aspects to the work, and Bob enjoys the relative freedom, the exercise, and being outside in the community. The romance of being a letter carrier attracts “everybody from academics to addicts, musicians and artists, to drunks. The sorting floor is a real melting pot of personalities.”
But the job is designed by an equation that doesn’t take into account other factors, like days when there’s double the mail, or bad weather.
“You’re basically left feeling like a corporate packhorse,” says Bob. “The job was designed by people who have never done it before.”
Bob is required to deliver everything that comes across his sort desk every day. Most days, he has just enough time to get this done. But on a busy day, finishing a route in eight hours is physically impossible. The corporation does pay employees for working overtime, but staying late at work isn’t optional.
“It’s not so bad here in Victoria because it’s generally mild,” he says. “But if you’re in Winnipeg, and it’s the middle of winter at -35, and you’re staying an hour or two later out in the cold and snow, well, no amount of overtime pay compensates for that.”
“It’s a dirty game they’re playing,” he says of management. “Everyone is overburdened and to even survive the workload you have to break the rules.”
Bob is referring to safety rules that stipulate how a letter carrier is to move up and down a street. They are only allowed to cross at crosswalks and intersections, not allowed to hop fences, hedges, or rails, and must visit houses in a pre-determined order that’s not always the most efficient. To get their work done, postal workers must find ways to circumvent these rules.
“Management knows that it’s happening, but they let it slide because if the work is being done in an eight-hour day, it justifies the heavier workload,” he says. “So they come up with these reports saying that we can do it in eight hours. What they don’t put in the reports is that carriers have to cheat to do it. And of course, if you had an accident, they would say, ‘Well, you weren’t following the rules, you were cheating, so we don’t have to pay you compensation.’”
Workers’ Compensation Board claims at Canada Post are so high that in the case of a serious injury they will send out an accident investigator to verify the employee’s version of events.
“The management will use any excuse not to pay compensation,” says Bob. “The detective will look around and say, ‘Oh, you stepped off onto the grass here, so you weren’t following your route.’ Then the employee is on the hook, not the corporation.”
The economics of privatization
Camosun business professor Bijan Ahmadi agrees with Barney that many of the changes at Canada Post are ideologically driven. “My question is: ‘What is the goal of Canada Post over the next few years?’” says Ahmadi.
Ahmadi believes that, unfortunately, the answer is privatization. As a crown corporation, Canada Post pays corporate dividends to the government. In 1981, the federal government created Canada Post Corporation as an independent, publicly owned entity whose mandate was to deliver mail to everybody in the country, regardless of where they live.
Canada Post operates over the largest jurisdiction of any postal system in the world, even Russia. Amazingly, Canadians still pay some of the lowest postal rates globally. To send a letter in Canada costs just over half of what it would cost in Norway.
To accomplish this feat, Canada Post delivers mail within urban centres at a profit, which is used to operate its mail service in more expensive, remote places. A private corporation would not have the same incentive, since the mandate of a private company is to make profit for its shareholders.
In business terms, the situation in which a service necessary for social welfare doesn’t make economic sense is called a market failure. For example, a company that only delivered mail to the Arctic would be hard-pressed to make any money without charging exorbitant rates for their services.
Without government intervention, a company operating on the free market would have no incentive to deliver mail to Inuvik when they could concentrate on more profitable urban centres.
Ahmadi believes this is why it’s important to keep Canada Post a public corporation. “That’s what crown corporations are good at doing: correcting market failures. And they provide good service,” says Ahmadi. “I know that something sent to Inuvik has as much of a chance of getting there in five days as something sent to Toronto. That’s important to us as Canadians. We require a unifying service like that.”
Ahmadi does believe that Canada Post should operate as efficiently as possible, and if that means converting door-to-door delivery to community mailboxes, he’s all for it. While it must maintain a certain standard of service for all Canadians, the corporation should not be “an inefficient provision of efficient resources,” he says.
If Canada Post can modernize and stay efficient while still providing services, this means more money is being paid to Ottawa in dividends and taxes, money that can fund health care and schools.
Canada Post and Camosun students
Second-year Marketing and Communications student Connor Rencher can’t remember the last time he sent anything in the post. Like many students, the majority of Rencher’s personal communication takes place online or through texting.
And while Rencher does order items online, he chooses whichever shipping provider is cheapest.
Nathan Gartner, a first-year Electronics Engineering Technology student, however, believes that Canada Post and physical mail still have a role to play in personal communications today. Gartner uses the post to keep in touch with family. He doesn’t think that ending door-to-door delivery makes sense.
“Why cut jobs? I’ve always had this romantic notion that I’d like to be a letter carrier,” he says. “You’re out in the community and it’s a physically healthy job to have. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I think it’s important that jobs like that exist.”
But Gartner thinks the post is important as more than just employment.
“My brother is in India right now. It’s nice to hear from him on email, because I get to see pictures of what he’s doing, but it would be really special to get a letter,” he says. “It’s epic that it would make it that far. For years I sent letters back and forth to a friend of mine in Nelson, and it really makes it special when something has to travel like that. Everything we are used to is happening too fast; all of our communications are instant.”
The sociology of communication
Camosun communications professor Lois Fernyhough agrees with Gartner that we may have lost something in the switch to all-digital communication.
“People crave speed,” says Fernyhough. “We seem to equate technological progress with moral progress, which is something we’ve done since the industrial age.”
But speed is not always the same as quality when it comes to communication.
“The medium you choose to deliver your message imparts a certain communicative value to the message and actually changes it somewhat,” says Fernyhough. “Generally speaking, the ease and speed at which we can communicate digitally is much different than sending off a letter… With electronic media, it’s very easy to send things off quickly, sometimes without thinking.”
Still, there are benefits to the improvements of ease and speed when it comes to communication. And communication, like any other facet of society, is bound to evolve along with the rest.
“Would you want your mail to be delivered by somebody walking to Toronto? Or riding a horse? I don’t think so,” says Fernyhough. “Is the model of Canada Post doomed to be on the reject pile superseded by technology? Maybe. Things are changing, and new models have to take the place of what has gone before. It had to be there to pave the way, but it soon gets superseded.”
The future of Canada Post
Back in the postal union office, Barney disagrees with Fernyhough’s assessment of the future of Canada Post. She points to the rise of e-commerce and the switch to parcel delivery as a positive step by management to keep the corporation current with society’s changing needs. In fact, the increased package volume from online shopping has actually created jobs in Victoria in recent years, she says.
Still, the union believes that there are other ways to modernize without having to cut jobs or services when it comes to lettermail delivery.
Barney points to postal banking as a possible revenue-generating stream that could pay for currently unprofitable but important services. With postal banking, the post office would offer basic banking services like cashing cheques, taking deposits, and offering small loans. It exists in many countries in Europe, where it generates large revenues to help their postal system cover other costs.
The precedent and legislation for Canada Post to offer banking services is well established; up until 1968, when a push by big banks and the government shut the service down, Canada Post did just that. Barney says many rural communities across Canada are lacking basic banking services.
“Small communities on the island here don’t even have a credit union. But every community has a post office. So Canada Post could easily offer postal banking in rural communities,” she says. “The big banks have all pulled out because they’re driven by profit and they can’t make enough. We already offer money orders and money-grams. The post offices are already there; they all have a safe and cash registers. There would be minimal infrastructure needed.”
The way forward for Canada Post may well be to step back into a stronger role as a pivotal link between people and communities. For students, this means better contact with families and more efficient package delivery when they order online. Despite the changes and disruptions it faces, Canada Post is doing its best to continue being a unifying force over the vast distances that are the reality of life in Canada.
Camosun student Nathan Gartner believes that the best way forward is to hold on to what we have.
“Is the postal system still relevant or is it just a romantic notion?” he says. “I don’t know. But I think it’s still important. I think it’s special.”