Harper did it in the beautifully guileless manner of those TV ads at 3 a.m., as Hugh Laurie would put it. “Tired of heavy things? Use light things. Frustrated by hard? Try easy. Can’t sleep? Lie down.”
Harper can’t stand city home delivery? Start not-at-home delivery. Sick of handing out EI cheques? Cease to do so. Against people putting their hands up? Cancel the census.
The Conservatives are not deft, creative, modern people at ease with the times. They don’t come up with ideas or manoeuvre in a changing global landscape, they just do the easy thing, which is to press Delete. There go 8,000 jobs.
I always credited Harper with cunning but after studying the latest post office clubbing — give up, the baby seal is dead now, it is a battered disc of blood and hair — I cannot see how it benefits the Conservative party. People who drone on about Canada Post and its union finally waking up to the death of paper messages are missing the point. This is not about mere envelopes and has not been for 20 years.
It’s about parcels — something that we measure out our lives with now — and our changing ways of purchasing. When the Tories liken home mail delivery to an elite longing for driveway servants, as did Government House Leader Peter Van Loan, they’re insulting their base with Tea Party nuttiness. They like to pit Canadians against each other. I won’t play. The fact that I don’t have a pension doesn’t mean I begrudge a pension to my co-workers or to the good people who deliver my mail.
Harper’s cold, tired rural voters have been trudging to distant mail gulags for decades. The people he is shocking and alienating now are his suburban voters, small businesses, and perhaps people in detached houses downtown.
He may see home delivery as a government intrusion into personal life but it is a basic service, just like attached sewers, and one hopes we won’t abandon them.
Harper has outdone himself this time. In his pursuit of ideological consistency and a swatting of a postal bug that has been biting at his skin since he worked at the National Citizens Coalition, he has distressed normal people.
I am one of them. I just bought a sewing machine and had it mailed to my home, I am making sugar cookies with cutters bought online and I order raccoon repellent from Halfords Mail Order Webstore, a great Alberta outfit. It’s called Critter Ridder, since you ask.
I buy stuff, as people do. I know a lot about the best way to do this, not just because the life of households interests me, but because the economic landscape is changing at lightning speed and I’m paid to track this sort of thing.
Canada’s voyageurs had basic tasks: paddle, build a fire, eat pemmican. In a vast country of climate extremes, a government has basic tasks: to build roads, count the people, send out smoke signals via the CBC about whatever city is flooding, help you send your mother a Christmas nightie.
I just did this last thing and it is the last flannel garment I’ll ever buy at Hudson’s Bay because the box won’t fit in a community mailbox, even if my mum could get to one. I know because I checked. Those things are ugly inconvenient litterbugs, a grey plastic Hadrian’s Wall, and one could not find a better symbol of the Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s prophecy, “private affluence and public squalor.”
It is true that all these services can be contracted out but so can everything. Dodgy Brothers Build-It can pave a road, people without a census can gather in small clusters and point at each other, Sun News TV can provide no news to speak of, and American-originated Amazon sells a vast assortment of tragic sleepwear.
All problematic tasks can be erased by not doing them in the first place. But Harper’s problem is that voters still want goods and services.
And here’s where we get to the weird part of what must surely be Harper’s decision, allegedly made in a panic that a Canada Post shortfall might briefly derail his dream of an (artificially) balanced budget.
There used to be two sectors — builders and buyers. Factories made things and housewives went into shops and bought them. Now that most goods are cheaply made elsewhere, and employed women no longer venture out daily to amass them, the intermediary is king. That means companies like Amazon, “the everything store,” as American journalist Brad Stone has called it, are raking it in.
It’s money Canada Post could have had the wit to rake in, an opportunity not just missed but actively pushed away.
Harper has spent his secretive, punitive reign telling us all the things we don’t need government to do for us. The thing he doesn’t mention is what is left that still needs doing, by someone, and that someone will be Amazon, originally named Relentless.com but changed to Amazon, after the world’s biggest river, because that sounded less scary.
If Canada Post were to be assisted in its own suicide by Walmart, destructive Arkansan Walmart, perhaps we could accept that. But Amazon is another entity altogether. It is a floating untaxed world. Stone’s wonderful book, The Everything Store, describes Amazon’s horror when it realized that one employee, who fell ill while working from his home in Quebec, might be legally regarded as such. It was part of Amazon.com’s tax-avoidance policy that it technically had no employees in Canada or in almost all of the U.S.
Harper would like you to think that destroying a perfectly plausible business is a tiny matter from an era of “delivery boys.”
Not so.
Amazon sells your life. That includes personal staff (Mechanical Turk), the cloud (Amazon Web Services), food (Amazon Fresh), household goods, clothing, fine art, its own books and films, and as the London Review of Books put it in a devastating Deborah Friedell piece titled Kill Your Own Business, “tanks, wolf urine, simulation models for infant circumcision, uranium ore, live ladybirds and Zimbabwean trillion dollar banknotes.”
Neoliberals have little national pride, seeing government services as a lousy menu in a failing local diner. It’s how Amazon presents itself and it’s attractive all right. I placed my first amazon.co.uk/amazon.ca order in the Nineties (even though Amazon.ca, which charges HST, is a lousy website) and when I view my purchasing history online, I’m astounded at how quickly it built up.
Amazon is a work of the genius that is Jeff Bezos. He is worth only $25 billion but would be a trillionaire if he actually cared about profit. Weirdly, he does not. Bezos even sees power as a mere means to an end, Stone reports. What he cares about is the vastly distant future. He is building a rocket that will take the human race into outer space where many of us will reside at some point. The Blue Origin rocket is on his ranch in Texas.
Amazon is starting to make things. It is a brilliant vision from the man who may be the greatest capitalist in human history. Note that in Britain, Amazon is setting up Sunday deliveries with its own trucks, like the trucks we’re about to junk.
If Harper has his way, Canada will eventually own nothing but land and he’ll discount our realtor’s fee when he sells it. He is no businessman.
I am telling you about Amazon in particular because it is an example of a world of possibilities that Canada Post and every other Canadian sellout have not seized because they no longer think we are a country.
We are an agglomeration, a federation of real estate that can’t even send itself wolf urine. I suspect Walmart will go the way of Sears, partly because laid-off postal workers won’t have the money to shop there, but discount corporate federations like Amazon will remain to raise the wolves, collect the fluid and ship it to us.
The problem will arise when it decides not to.
Amazons are the unkillable monopolies. Destroying institutions like Canada Post leaves us with nowhere to retreat. There is no polite way to say this. We gave up on the Avro Arrow, we let Lockheed Martin run our census in 2006 and 2011, the once-great CBC withers, and our main up-and-coming industry is prisons. We are approaching what Amazon prefers, a nation that is not national.
In the meantime, in preparation for $1 stamps, Canada Post has stopped selling its permanent no-pricetag stamps. I have books of them. They’re awful-looking things, sheets of tacky pink flowers. They don’t even have the Queen’s head on them.
“Fresh, vibrant collectibles!” chirps Canada Post despairingly on the package.
Yes, that will be us in 2018.
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