As Canada Post announced earlier this week, it will be putting some of these suggestions in place in the New Year, ending home delivery to the 35 per cent of its current customers who still receive it, and eliminating 6,000 to 8,000 jobs. At the same time, the corporation announced that the price of a stamp will jump from 63 cents to a dollar — 85 cents if you buy a roll of ten.
Nowhere in its report did the Conference Board recommend hiking the price of letter mail. It is completely insane to offer less service for more money — unless your secret aim is to kill a business. If I were a Christmas card manufacturer, I would sue.
For one can only conclude that Ottawa wants to do by stealth what it doesn’t have the guts to do directly: make letter mail so costly and inefficient that people either abandon it or demand a change — namely competition — to bring costs down and improve service. In other words, privatize Canada Post.
Canada Post’s charter currently grants the corporation both the obligation and a protected monopoly to deliver letter mail to Canadian households. That worked to its advantage before the Internet decimated letter mail. It now represents an albatross that Canada Post needs to shed. But if it goes, then there is no reason to keep its status as a Crown corporation at all, since it would then represent merely a state-owned version of FedEx or Purolator.
But instead of simply biting this bullet, the government has decided to chew it slowly, painfully, over the next five years. The rationale is purely political: It doesn’t want to head into the 2015 election with the P-word emblazoned on its forehead.
Why run from one of the few truly conservative things it could be doing while in office? At a time when their base is questioning the government’s conservative bona fides in the throes of the Senate scandal, the Tories could use a red meat boost. And when such an action falls in line with that taken by postal operations around the world — in countries such as the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands — it would be hard for many Red Tory or centrist voters to question it. The Tories would be merely joining the parade, not leading it.
As for the pushback from labour, setting up a showdown with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers wouldn’t be a bad thing, politically speaking. Most Canadians, conservative or not, have little sympathy for postal workers, especially when they hear that Canada Post has an absenteeism rate 60 per cent higher than the Canadian average for manufacturing employees and 20 per cent higher than for all unionized employees, according to a 2007 C.D. Howe study.
The union will be fighting the current set of changes, of course, especially the job cuts. But a down and dirty fight over privatization would be that much more intense — and could benefit the government.
For if there is one thing the Conservatives have to do in 2014, it’s recapture the agenda from the Senate scandal and turn the spotlight back on the economy. They need to represent the sensible alternative to the socialist NDP and the wet-behind-the-ears Liberals. Stephen Harper needs to paint Thomas Mulcair as radical, and Justin Trudeau as ignorant. And ideally, the Tories must reestablish the right-left poralization with the NDP that allowed them to squeeze the Liberals out in the 2011 election.
What better way to do it than force a discussion of serious economic and labour issues? Galvanize Big Labour behind the NDP, and expose Trudeau as someone who thinks the Laffer curve is the applause meter at Yuk Yuk’s.
The Conservatives are already planning a revival of Bill C-377, demanding greater financial transparency of unions. They are battling the Public Service Alliance of Canada over cuts to the federal public service. And the party endorsed resolutions demanding secret ballots during strikes and banning the use of dues for political purposes at its national convention in November.
So why not do the right thing for Canada Post, both literally and ideologically? If there’s anything Canadians hunger for in politics, it’s honesty. And, in this season of tidings and joy, a better way to mail that Christmas card.
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