Where are they going to put the damned boxes?
Changing technology likely means we have no choice but to do away with home mail delivery, but there’s reason to worry both about Canada Post’s ability to manage the change and the federal government’s will to supervise the Crown corporation.
So far, the signs are not encouraging. Canada Post announced its plans Wednesday, the day after the House of Commons rose for its Christmas break, which means the government won’t face opposition questions until the new year.
Lisa Raitt, the minister responsible, issued a statement saying the government supported the change, but declined interview requests, cravenly sidestepping her responsibility to explain a decision that would affect the daily lives of millions of Canadians.
To understand why she is hiding, and why we should be nervous, consider that only the most urban third of Canadians still receive home delivery from Canada Post. The Conservatives are not competitive in most cities, which means they don’t have good political reasons to explain the changes, or to make sure that they are carried out in a responsible way.
Until recently, Mayor Coderre was the Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Bourassa. In the byelection called to replace him, the Conservatives came fourth, with less than five per cent of the vote. In Toronto Centre, which was a Tory seat until 1993, the Conservatives came third, with less than nine per cent of the vote.
City people regularly voted for the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, but Stephen Harper’s coalition is less welcoming for red Tories, and the Conservatives are no longer a factor in most of Canada’s urban neighbourhoods.
In the unforgiving world of electoral politics, strategists can’t afford to spend too much time worrying about people who will never vote for their party. Strategists on the Issues Management team at the Prime Minister’s Office are likely behind the decision to keep Raitt, a talented communicator, from facing questions about Canada Post, and for the decision to announce the change after the House rose for the season.
Those same strategists have little reason to care if Canada Post — a bureaucratic, top-heavy outfit — makes life unnecessarily inconvenient for urbanites.
Over the years, Canada Post has shut down post offices and shifted services to retail outlets in drugstores. That has provided better service at lower cost, but when a drugstore in my neighbourhood of Ottawa closed its postal outlet, apparently because Canada Post wasn’t paying enough for the space, they moved parcel pickup to a store two kilometres away, which means every time I need to pick up a parcel I’m looking at a 50-minute walk there and back.
I don’t like that, but what am I going to do? Complain? Canada Post, inevitably, has a monopoly culture.
Setting up community mailboxes in dense urban areas is going to be expensive and difficult. In places where many people don’t have cars and land is expensive, Canada Post can’t plunk down community mailboxes in the same way it does in the suburbs.
The Canadian Postal Service Charter, which lays out the standard of service the federal government requires Canada Post to provide, doesn’t say anything about what will be a reasonable distance from community mailboxes. The opposition New Democrats were quick to jump on this issue, launching an online petition that deplores the decision to end door-to-door delivery, noting it will get rid of “up to 8,000 good-paying jobs.”
It’s fair enough for opposition politicians to attack the government for cutting services, but Canada Post is facing a cash crisis as people do things online — like sign petitions, for instance — that we once did on paper. The only alternative to this is injecting tax dollars — $1 billion a year by 2020, according to a Conference Board of Canada projection.
The NDP, with its close ties to unions, will act as if the interests of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the public are aligned, but anyone who recalls the bitter history of Christmas-season labour disputes with CUPW should be skeptical.
During a strike in 1975, for instance, then-CUPW president Joe Davidson told a reporter “to hell with the public.”
These days, thankfully, CUPW can’t bring the economy to a halt with a strike as it once could, but its members are still looked after better than most of the people who pay for stamps.
If the NDP wants to convince Canadians that it can be trusted to one day run the federal government, it should avoid promising subsidies to buggy-whip manufacturers, accept that the digital revolution is changing things and quickly turn to putting pressure on the posties to manage this transition properly.
Market forces may help. In parcel delivery, the part of the business growing thanks to online shopping, Canada Post must compete with UPS and FedEx. If Canada Post wants to keep its market share, it had better hope Coderre’s constituents like their new mailboxes.
Happily, Canada Post’s CEO and 21 vice-presidents, whose cushy jobs depend on the bottom line, have better motivation to get this right than any politician.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Stephen Maher
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