Jackhammers, Jokers and the end of Canada Post

How politics deprived Canada Post of the opportunity to reform and now it is too late

The most short-sighted (and frankly stupid) political stunt that I saw during my time in politics happened in 2015 in the months before the election that would end my time in the Harper government. The impact of this stunt and the dumb policy that surrounded it is still impacting the country a decade later, so it is worthy of a short case study.

The stunt emanated from the strange political alliance of third party leader Justin Trudeau and his former parliamentary colleague Denis Coderre over the issue of Canada Post. Coderre had already left the House of Commons and was serving as the Mayor of Montréal. Trudeau was the MP for the Montréal riding of Papineau and was preparing his run to become Prime Minister. In that run, Trudeau had the approach of attacking anything related to the Harper Conservative government and didn’t seem concerned about whether any of the policies were good for the country or not. This extended to the modernization plan from Canada Post, which came from the Crown corporation itself and not the government. It was supported by the Conservative government, but the case for modernization was made by Canada Post and any serious person following the issues would have found the modernization plan to be smart and absolutely necessary.

Canada Post Modernization

It is important to note at the outset that Canada Post ceased being a department of the Canadian government in 1981 when the Canada Post Corporation Act created an independently-managed Crown corporation that was self-funding. This move was made after major deficits were accumulated by the department in the 1970s, and upon the belief that independence and private sector discipline would lead to better service and less financial exposure for the government. The move seemed to work because Canada Post Corporation (hereinafter Canada Post) turned its first profit since the 1950s just a few years later.

Canada Post continued to show an innovative approach to mail delivery and changing consumer tastes. It began to implement community mailboxes for new suburban home developments in 1985. It acquired a controlling stake in Purolator Courier to expand parcel delivery services in 1993, and began online billing services to try and adapt to the switch from paper bills to online payments. By the mid-2000s, however, modernization efforts to increase automation and reduce costs was not keeping pace with rapidly changing consumer habits and a massive drop in mail usage. The need to cut costs led to outsourcing of postal outlets into retail stores and rural mail delivery to contractors in order to control costs. This led to continual labour frictions as employees saw the change in mail volumes but did not want to change an institution that had been viewed for generations as an essential service and a job for life. This presented major challenges for the corporation. The CEO during this time, Moya Greene, had streamlined operations and had been suggesting the need to privatize the Crown corporation, but minority government politics of that time did not make it possible.

Canada Post was also facing a major pension shortfall at the time to the tune of more than $6 Billion. The Harper government had backed Canada Post on their pension issues by allowing the Crown company to operate normally without making special payments to the pension fund. After my election in late 2012, I was told by caucus colleagues that privatization of Canada Post had not been possible a few years earlier due to the pension issue and the simple fact that Prime Minister Harper knew that the opposition would not have supported privatization of Canada Post in a minority parliament. By the time Harper achieved his majority in 2011, Moya Greene was gone and leading the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom, where she successfully guided that Crown agency through a privatization at an opportune time.

The Canada Post 5 Point Action Plan

Canada Post had missed the obvious window for a privatization because of minority parliament dynamics. By the time I joined the government as a Parliamentary Secretary in 2013, Canada Post was grappling with the fact that they were processing 1.4 Billion fewer pieces of mail than they were just seven years earlier. Despite automation and changes made the decade before, the Canada Post business model was just no longer feasible in the age of parcel delivery and instantaneous communications through email, text and social media. Canada Post was preparing a major plan to evolve the Crown corporation to adapt to the new realities of the marketplace. Canada Post expected that it would have enough political cover to roll this out amid the majority government of Prime Minister Harper. At the time, I was told that alternate day delivery was being explored as an option along with a range of other changes to delivery practices to pivot towards the e-commerce future and more sustainable revenues.

I supported the changes that were coming because I represented a growing, largely suburban riding where most working families (like my own) had already had evolved their mail habits and would only check their community mailboxes a couple of times per week. The checks would only happen daily if you were expecting a packages from online purchases. At that time, it was quite rudimentary, as it was not the Amazon Prime era we are in today. Back then it was simple things like Mable’s Labels for the kid’s or LL Bean or other pioneering e-commerce retailers that people were ordering. These suburban households could see that more of this e-commerce was coming in the future and so could Canada Post.

In December 2013 - just the day after the House of Commons rose for the Christmas break - Canada Post revealed its plan to adjust to the new reality of mail services. They announced major changes that were intended to stave off permanent deficits and save approximately $700 to $900 million annually. In reality, the plan was also an effort to prevent a potential bankruptcy for the Crown company in the future if it did not act. I said this in Ottawa and in my riding in the months after this launch when the plan became controversial. Deemed its ‘five-point plan to get back to profitability’, Canada Post stated that it intended to:

1. End doorstep urban delivery and transition all homes to a community mailbox model;

2. Dramatically increase the price for stamps and use tiered pricing for mail;

3. Expand retail postal outlets and close many smaller postal offices;

4. Negotiate new collective agreements for labour including lower salaries and shift to a defined contribution pension to limit pension liability; and

5. Streamline operations and position the company for a package future as much as possible.

The move was a sound one based on the realities of the marketplace and shifts to consumer behaviour that were never going to shift back. I thought it was executed well by the CEO Deepak Chopra, who seemed to speak to the habits of families in my riding in some of his commentary about the changes. He said that he wanted Canada Post “to add value to Canadians who are leading really busy lives. From being your letter box, we want to become your shopping cart”. The plan was also supported by the responsible Minister, Lisa Raitt, who stressed it was important for the Crown company to be self sufficient in a changing marketplace.

For rural and suburban ridings across the country, there was not going to be any real change beyond the increase to the price of stamps. This was because 68% of Canadian households were already using community mailboxes. They had also largely developed habits around it. It was only the older, generally affluent areas of the urban centres where the community mailbox change was going to cause changes to routines people were accustomed to. These neighbourhoods were will informed and politically powerful area, but the reality was that the changes would have been minimal to them. It was unfair for 68% of taxpaying householders without doorstep delivery to subsidize the ability for a declining minority of generally affluent households to check their junk mail deliveries each day before tossing them in the recycling bin. That is what was already happening in 2013/14 and it is only more severe now. (Full Disclosure: I now live in Toronto with doorstep delivery and would approximate that 95% of what I receive is advertising flyers or junk mail).

When parliament returned in 2014, the politics continued with opposition parties and with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) in particular. In fairness, it was understandable that CUPW would oppose the plan. They had good reason to be concerned for their members, but they had also backed themselves into this corner by past labour actions. They had a reputation of being a difficult union and did not want to face the commercial reality of their marketplace. The age of ‘jobs for life’ was over and they needed to ensure the employee pension plan was secured for existing workers and move on to a new model for younger and new workers. I would always meet with my local CUPW representative for a good discussion of the issues, but his suggestions of a return to postal banking or “wellness checks” on seniors were simply not serious proposals in my view. We needed to make real changes to adapt to consumer trends or we were dooming Canada Post to a future of oblivion.

The Payphone Teaching Moment

In 2014, I received a lot of constituency correspondence on the Canada Post 5 Point Plan and the loss of doorstep delivery for the older downtown portions of my riding in Bowmanville, Port Perry and Uxbridge. When I say correspondence, I of course mean emails. I likely only received a handful of letters in relation to the Canada Post issue, which I always found to be a delicious irony that I would share with constituents that I called on the issue. “Thanks for your email to me regarding changes Canada Post is making due to the fact that there are a billion fewer letters being sent each year because of email…”

Like is always the case with MPs who receive mass email advocacy campaigns, the MP and team prepare a standard response that goes out to people who send identical and often automated emails to you based on their postal code. I would defend my approach by the fact that if you sent me a form email, you would get a detailed and respectful form response from me. For those who called or emailed me organically, I would try and tailor my response to their specific questions or concerns. I took a serious approach with my response to the Canada Post issue and used an illustrative example that every single constituent I communicated with would relate to: payphones.

Payphones were once ubiquitous in Canada from every major street corner to all of the arenas, pools and public buildings. For Canadians of a certain age, we remember 10 cent and 25 cent calls and calling ‘collect’ to our parents from one location or another. I even wrote one of my first blogs on the topic of Canada Post changes and used the memory of using the pay phone in the old Bowmanville Arena to call my Mom after I scored my first goal. Any homeowner (general 30 years of age or older) in the areas impacted by the phasing out doorstep delivery in Canada could relate to the payphone example. They had watched payphones virtually disappear and all of them had mobile phones. In the years preceeding the Canada Post 5 point plan, fifteen thousand pay phones had been removed across Canada because of the decline in their use.

The internet revolution had not just impacted traditional mail, but the rise of mobile phones and digital means of communication led to massive changes to consumer habits and the virtual extinction of the public payphone. By 2014, there had also been a significant decline of the use of home landline phones as well. Today, the majority of Canadian homes do not have a landline and rely completely on their mobile phones for communications. People saw this happening around them and it could be connected easily to the challenges Canada Post was facing.

When I provided a detailed answer to constituents using the payphone example to justify the Canada Post 5 point plan, almost all of them understood the move. I told them I was in public office to be straight up with people even when it was difficult. While I cannot say most of them changed their minds, I certainly know that all of them acknowledged the fact that Canada Post could not ignore the reality of changing consumer habits. Unfortunately, too many MPs would not rationally consider the issues in the same way most of my consistuents did.

Many of the emails to me would also copy the general contact line for Canada Post or its CEO. I was very impressed by the fact that Mr. Chopra responded personally on a few of them. He even sent me a note saying he liked the example I was using in my responses. That was a sign of great leadership. While the opposition parties would attack him for his awkward, albeit well-intentioned, example of community mailboxes helping seniors ‘get their exercise’, I think Mr. Chopra was another example of an excellent senior Crown official trying to serve the public good. I was disappointed that politics would descend upon his rationale plan and earnest efforts to avoid the position that Canada Post is now in. He deserved better and so did Canadians.

Coderre Jumps the Shark with Trudeau Driving the Boat

Getting back to the premise of my essay and the worst stunt I saw in my time in politics. While the Liberals were initially only mildly critical in their response to the Canada Post 5 Point Plan, this tune would change over the next eighteen months as the union became more aggressive and some of the large urban mayors began to criticize the move. Considering most urban MPs were also almost entirely NDP or Liberal, there was also a growing competition between the two parties on the centre left for these voters. The aggressiveness of the issue in late 2014 and early 2015 was best embodied by Montréal Mayor Denis Coderre. Ironically, Coderre had only resigned as an MP just a few months before Canada Post had unveiled its 5 point plan, so he should have been the most informed Canadian mayor on the challenges Canada Post was facing. Rather than leverage his experience as a former MP and Minister of the Crown, Coderre preferred to play politics in harmony with his former colleagues in Ottawa. He was very vocal in his criticism of the Canada Post plan and even made the decision for the City of Montréal to join the CUPW legal action against the changes in Federal Court.

2015 was an election year, so the rhetoric from the Liberal party and its leader also began to heat up. Seemingly ignoring the fact that his father’s government made the changes to Canada Post being a self sufficient Crown corporation in 1981, Justin Trudeau decried the fact that Canada Post was becoming a “profit-making enterprise”. His language made it seem like mail delivery was still the responsibility of the federal government, and he vowed to restore this “proper service” for Canadians if he was to become Prime Minister.

The Liberal Party platform from 2015 included his pledge to save doorstep mail delivery. Ironically, this pledge was included in a section of their platform that began with a call to action for services that began with the line: “[i]n a digital era, Canadians have high standards for the service they receive.” It was the digital era, after all, that the Canada Post 5 point plan was meant to address.

The ‘Jump the Shark’ moment for Trudeau and Coderre happened when the Montréal Mayor took his crusade against the Canada Post changes from legal action to illegal action. Just days after the 2015 election was called surprisingly early by PM Harper, Denis Coderre - hardhat on his head - showed up to a press conference in the Pierrefonds neighbourhood with a jackhammer. Surrounded by local officials and dozens of media cameras and reporters, Coderre proceeded to use the construction tool to destroy the concrete slab recently laid by Canada Post in preparation for the installation of a community mailbox. In what could only be viewed as a bad joke or an angry attack, here was an elected official destroying public property in from the cameras to make a political point. To make things worse, a few weeks later, Justin Trudeau stood beside the Mayor at a press conference making light of Coderre’s actions saying only that as Prime Minister he would “work to restore mail service to Canadians who expect it to be a proper service from their government and not a profit-making enterprise”.

That was it. The craziest political stunt I saw in my decade of public life. A former Liberal MP breaking the law with a jackhammer in front of the cameras and a candidate for Prime Minister of Canada essentially endorsing these actions.

Post Script

We all know what happened in the days, weeks and years after the jackhammer was turned off. The Liberals won the election and Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister. After a brief police investigation, the Crown decided not to proceed with criminal charges against Denis Coderre. He was, however, rejected by Montréalers in the next election. Prime Minister Trudeau later also waffled on his 2015 pledge. He halted the community mailbox expansion for doorstep service areas, but he did not restore doorstep service to all areas that had lost it as he promised he would.

The Liberals had also promised to study the wider issue of Canada Post reform, but that process was more of a sideshow than anything serious. The parliamentary committee report on this study ended up being a dog’s breakfast of whimsical recommendations to ‘explore’ “community hubs” and Canada Post delivering “digital communications” to rural areas, but there were a few nuggets of reality in the report that sounded a lot like elements of the 5 point plan. I particularly liked Recommendation 31 which stated:

Canada Post work at being competitive in the parcel delivery area and utilize its distribution network and last mile delivery services to its advantage, when working with its competitors…

Today, Canada Post is facing the existential crisis that was forecast back in 2013. They are seeing letter mail continue to decline and have been losing more and more parcel delivery work to independent contractors for Amazon and other e-commerce companies. The facts and figures surrounding Canada Post are grim:

• Since 2017, Canada Post has lost $3 Billion.

• In 2025, the government had to provide $1 Billion in special funding to keep the Crown corporation solvent.

• At least $1 Billion in government subsidy is expected to be required every year beginning in 2026.

• Over the last twenty years, 3 million new addresses have been adedd to the delivery mandate of Canada Post.

• Over the same period, letter mail declined by over 3 billion fewer pieces per year giving Canada Post less revenues to help their efforts to serve 3 million new homes.

And, the slab that was destroyed by Denis Coderre in 2015? It was rebuilt and installed in 2018 (photo below).

RIP Canada Post. Political stunts and posturing failed you.