On May 23, Canada Post workers once again entered a legal strike position. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) had previously been on strike less than six months ago, during the holiday season, in an attempt to work out a new collective agreement. So far, the workers have opted for an “overtime ban,” a refusal to do any overtime work, rather than a full strike.
In the lead-up to the May 23 deadline, Canada Post management refused a two-week truce proposed by the workers which would have held off any potential work stoppage. An actual strike or lockout could now begin at any time.
The stakes are high. Canada Post is a vital Canadian institution, which serves Canadians across the country in an affordable and reliable public logistics network for letters, parcels, and more. But the organization is facing a financial crisis, and its future is very much on the table in this round of negotiations.
A model reaching its end
Canada Post is a crown corporation, meaning that, like all crown corporations, it is managed independently of the whims of Parliament. Unlike other crown corporations like the CBC, however, Canada Post receives no taxpayer funding. It is meant to be entirely self-financed through its own activities, such as selling stamps, and receives no funding from the federal government. That changed slightly last year, when the feds provided a loan of just over $1 billion to keep it afloat.
The Canada Post Corporation, though, is a relatively recent invention. The crown corporation was actually only created as an independent entity in 1981, when parliament passed the Canada Post Corporation Act. Prior to that, the post office was managed directly by the federal government as the Post Office Department. Now, it would have a CEO instead of postmaster general, and it would operate independently of the government.
Creating Canada Post was meant to solve a number of problems. From the federal government’s perspective, creating an independent (and self-financed) crown corporation would allow it to offload the post office’s growing deficits and impose some market discipline on the organization’s operations. Canada Post Corporation announced its first surplus in 1989.
From the workers’ perspective, too, it would simplify negotiations over their contracts—previously, the workers had been forced to navigate a byzantine maze of responsibility-shifting, in which post office management claimed that they couldn’t act in certain ways due to orders from the federal government, while the federal government claimed it was post office management’s responsibility to make decisions.
It was a mess, and creating an independent crown corporation was meant to solve some of that complexity.
So Canada Post Corporation would lose out on federal funding, while continuing to be required to service every home address in Canada on every business day. In exchange for this, the federal government granted the corporation a monopoly on letter mail delivery in Canada.
This arrangement worked well, for a while. Canada Post maintained service, even as the number of addresses in the country grew, and even turned a profit. Workers were able to make real gains in the simplified negotiating structure—including being the first workers outside Quebec to win maternity leave, paving the way for parental leave to become a universal right a few years later.
Then, of course, things changed. The internet arrived and cratered letter mail—both by eliminating letter-based correspondence as well as digitizing things like bank statements. Over the past 20 years, letter mail volume has declined by 3 billion articles per year, each of which means less stamp income for the corporation—all while the number of addresses it must service daily has risen by 3 million.
The parcel market has, of course, grown dramatically over the past decades due to the rise in online shopping, particularly since the pandemic. But unlike letters, Canada Post has no monopoly over parcels, and competes with private, for-profit carriers in that space.
For a long time, that meant large companies like FedEx, DHL, and UPS—but in recent years, it has been forced to compete with an army of low-wage gig economy subcontractors with no benefits or job security. These operations tend to concentrate in urban areas—which are profitable—while leaving unprofitable remote areas to Canada Post, further draining its resources. Since those companies entered the market in large numbers, Canada Post’s market share for parcel delivery has tanked—from 62 per cent in 2019 to 29 per cent in 2023.
The crown corporation is now losing around a billion dollars per year, and has operated at a loss for the past seven years. Without the billion dollar loan it received from the federal government in January 2025, it likely would have had to cease operations.
The federal government ended a strike at Canada Post earlier this year by creating an Industrial Inquiry Commission to investigate the labour dispute, forcing workers back to work while they waited for the results. The commission’s report, which came out in May, argued that the company must significantly transform its operations. It provided a number of recommendations:
- Ending door-to-door mail delivery (except for businesses) and replacing it with community mailboxes
- Ending the moratorium on rural post office closures
- Allowing Canada Post to hire part-time workers to cover week and weekend parcel delivery
- Introduce “dynamic routing” to change delivery routes on a daily basis based on parcel volumes
- Simplify the process to increase stamp prices
Taken together, these recommendations represent a market-driven roadmap for how Canada Post could try to compete with private sector parcel delivery. But what if those are the answers to the wrong question?
A roadmap for a 21st century post office
It’s true that Canada Post needs fundamental change—both the workers and management agree on that. It’s also true that many of those changes need to take place outside of the bargaining table—through changes to legislation, the postal charter, and so on.
What, though, should be the end goal of those changes? It’s quite clear that Canada Post, in its current model, cannot compete with the hyper-exploitative gig economy operations of the Amazon age. Why would we even want it to?
Canada Post is a fundamentally different operation than the new entrants into the parcel sector. It is a highly-developed logistics network with unparalleled reach—warehouses and sorting plants across the country, and the capacity to service every address in Canada. No fly-by-night gig delivery company comes even close to that capacity.
The issue is that Canada Post’s outdated structure—and lack of ability to change it without legislative help—makes it unable to take advantage of its strengths. In Parliament and at the negotiating table, there’s a lot of room to make changes that would strengthen the post office.
Ban gig economy practices in the Canada Labour Code: Many of the larger courier companies which “compete” with Canada Post in the parcel delivery sector are regulated by the Canada Labour Code, as opposed to provincial labour codes, while many of the smaller ones are provincially regulated. The federal government should immediately reform the code to ban exploitative gig economy practices, strengthen worker protections against illegal misclassification as “independent contractors,” and guarantee a minimum wage for all delivery drivers (as opposed to the piece-work system in place at many companies right now, where workers are paid per parcel). Doing so would take the wind out of the sails of some of the most predatory actors in the sector, who are hoovering up market share at the expense of good jobs. Having set the model, the feds should then work with the provinces to encourage them to change their labour codes as well.
Weekend delivery that works for workers: One of the key sticking points at the negotiating table is weekend delivery of parcels. Both sides agree that it needs to happen, but don’t agree on how workers should be classified. A number of collective agreements have threaded the needle here in ways that could be applied here—and it is vital that the parties come to an agreement on the issue. Canada Post needs to deliver parcels on weekends, and organize those deliveries in a way that preserves and expands good jobs at the post office.
Increase stamp prices with inflation: Canada Post’s stamp prices have not kept up with the cost of inflation and wages in Canada, and increasing stamp prices is a bureaucratically cumbersome process. The federal government could implement automatic annual stamp price increases at the rate of inflation.
Federal capital funding for Canada Post: The current government ran on a platform of big “nation-building” projects, defending important Canadian institutions like CBC, and increasing investment in building Canadian infrastructure. It can hit all three of these marks by opening up a new and reliable capital fund for Canada Post, allowing the crown corporation to tap into resources to do things like build new parcel facilities, renew its vehicle fleet with Canadian-made electric vehicles, using the existing network of post offices to build a national electric vehicle charging network, and more.
Transfer shuttered Amazon warehouses to Canada Post: One obvious place where the federal government could begin moving Canada Post towards greater parcel capacity would be by expropriating the parcel sorting facilities that Amazon has abandoned in Quebec, and handing them over to the post office. Canada Post could then hire the Amazon workers, who the company illegally fired for unionizing, as part of a plan to ramp up its parcel delivery capacity and take back market share.
Service expansion at the post office: Canada Post workers have a well-developed plan for how the post office could move beyond logistics, becoming in addition a network of community hubs across the country. This includes things like a revival of postal banking (which existed in Canada until banks pressured the government to end the program in 1968) which could finance community development initiatives, having postal workers perform voluntary wellness checks on seniors and Canadians living with disabilities, building high-speed internet infrastructure at rural post offices to expand rural internet access, and more. All of these options, in addition to modernizing Canada Post and expanding services for Canadians, would also bring in new revenue to the crown corporation—and they all exist, in some form, in countries around the world.
Extend Canada Post’s letter monopoly to small parcels: In the years leading up to Canada Post’s creation in 1981, the workers and the government negotiated for a long time over what exactly should be subject to the post office’s mandate. In the end, the federal government granted the crown corporation a monopoly over letters, but not parcels. The workers’ position, however, was that the mandate should be extended to small parcels—within a size range typically used by small businesses, not corporate giants. What would the post office look like today if that had been the case? Taking this scenario further, the federal government could also provide Canada Post with funding in order to deliver parcels at a loss, effectively providing a subsidy to Canadians looking to start their own businesses.
Public consultations on governance reform: The rules that govern Canada Post were written in two stages—in 1981, when the crown corporation was created, and in 2009, with the postal charter. Both of these documents are severely outdated and do not reflect the ways that Canadians use the post office—or logistics more broadly—in the era of mass digitization. Both these governing documents should be re-written, from scratch, in a process that is fully open and democratic. Communities across the country continue to rely on the post office—what do they want it to look like?
Protecting Canadian institutions
There is no doubt that Canada Post is in a real moment of crisis. The post office—an institution that helped to build this country, set workplace standards from which all Canadians benefit, and continues to provide vital services to all Canadians, especially rural Canadians—is under threat by a combination of institutional inertia, a structure built for a different era, and outside threats from predatory capital.
Canadians feel strongly about protecting our institutions, particularly now. The current government of Canada rode to power, against all odds, on that wave of popular sentiment. It should start acting that way when it comes to Canada Post.
The government still has the room to save the public post office, but it needs to act boldly and decisively. If we lose the post office, we will miss it.
