Canadian Post Office Review

The Post Office has come up for discussion again and as a retired letter carrier I feel compelled to share some thoughts.

Levity first:

If they increase the price of stamps any further they'll have to put tranquilizer in the glue. (Of course stamps are self-adhesive today.)

Mail delivery would improve if employees all received their pay cheques in the mail. (We've been compelled to accept auto-deposit.)

When I retired in 08 Special Unaddressed Bulk (Junk) Mail was Canada Post's most profitable line accounting for 20% of her profits. With good reason the fact that you may opt out of receiving it has never been promoted.

Breaking the Post Office's former monopoly on parcel delivery has seen private couriers syphon off the most profitable sectors leaving the post office to handle unprofitable communities which private enterprise chooses not to service routinely dropping parcels they've accepted for such areas in the mail stream.

Because I chose to travel upon retirement I pay all my bills electronically.

We have now raised several generations that seem to be functionally illiterate. I have 100 Facebook “Friends” I maintain simply because I would not hear from them otherwise. They seem incapable of composing E-mail, they certainly don't write letters.

Were it not for mailers who want addressed admail and the unaddressed variety delivered to the door Canada Post would be out of business.

And then there are the politically correct services mandated by parliament. Free mail for the blind, Discounts for Second Class Periodical Mail, (Magazines), Military Mail, and Library mail. A library can mail a book anywhere for under a dollar even if it's a 50 lb encyclopedia.

A slight diversion. Last I heard the Canadian Army had two divisions and 40 generals. Those generals may have been uncertain in defining their exact duties but they were certainly aware of all the perks of their position and used them to the hilt. (Does this sound like certain Senators and Cabinet Ministers?)

Take a look at the number of Vice-Presidents at Canada Post. We don't promote from within so they're more sure of their perks than they are about how mail moves. Why does Canada Post have a skybox at the Roger's Centre or a former box at the Corel Centre in Ottawa. This may be sour grapes, I was never invited.

Canada Post is top heavy with management. All important decisions are made at the National Level but there are Regional Offices, Area Managers, and local Postal Managers (Postmasters no longer exist as we traditionally knew them). All these functionaries spend most of their time exchanging E-mail. A first level supervisor gets the same E-mail from all four levels of management who then complain if he/she deletes it without reading it.

Local level supervisors are not allowed to make important decisions such as suspending mail delivery in bad weather. Even when buses, taxis, and even police are pulled off the road a supervisor in a remote location with an Air Conditioned Office and climate controlled parking will decide that mail should go out. Canada Post is not concerned with the safety of their delivery employees until the temperature hits 117º F. I joke that the people who work in plants can be thankful that computers require A/C. And then we have statements from our president such as Eighty-year-olds enjoying the walk to a superbox in the winter.

Well and good that one is not required to deliver to a house with unshovelled or icy drive, walkway, or steps; but what if the entire street is unploughed. Increasingly the case now that communities such as Oakville no longer provide their own snow removal service.

Employers get the unions they deserve. Before unions and collective bargaining the most common letter carrier injury was a shoulder separation because there was no limit to the weight of a mail bag. Customers may complain when delivery to a ground level mail slot is refused but you bend over day in and day out with a 35-lb mail bag on your back.

Canada Post complained they had too many unions so they engineered the demise of the LCUC. The CUPW is a top down hierarchical union whose first priority is the protection of the rights of the union. Any employee who accepts a temporary supervisory position faces expulsion. Their motto printed on all communications is The Struggle Continues. In principal their objective is to obstruct management not to work toward practical solutions.

Unions are a necessary evil. Until Canada Post farmed out payroll to CIBC at any given time 1/3 of all employees had a problem with their pay generated for 20,000 employees from one office in Ottawa.

On the other hand there is good reason why employees go postal. With arrogant upper management who have no concept of how mail is moved many boneheaded decisions get made. Those who know better won't speak up for fear of jeopardizing their chances of promotion. Canada Post got a superior court ruling that states that mail can be delivered in the dark in modern cities. They aren't the ones who have to face dogs homeowners figure it's safe to allow run lose.

The golden age for mail delivery was in the early 70ies. Having a uniformed employee present on foot who knew a neighbourhood provided a certain level of security. Community Mailbox Serviced customers let their mail collect for weeks at a time. If someone with fake ID puts their mail on hold with a view to stealing their credit cards or Identity the letter carrier will not suspect because he will not be at their door and see them come and go.

Christmas mail has now decreased to the point that we no longer have specific Christmas operations. Grandmas still send birthday cards mind you and receive greetings on the special occasions promoted by the greeting card industry.

Computerized mail sorting is a mixed blessing. It's no coincidence that the ideal letter size is the dimensions of a former key-punch card. Workers complained for years about paper cuts from open-window envelopes and punctures from staples and paper clips. These were all outlawed within a week of computer sorted mail. On the other hand how do you explain to a customer that the reason her sister's letter from East End Montreal takes 3 weeks to get to her is because dyslexia runs in the family or their handwriting is so illegible the Optical Character Reader misinterprets it. Some customers provide relatives printed mailing labels.

The cost of Workman's Compensation for Letter Carriers was second only to National Defence. This does not make Letter Carriers accident prone but betokens the fact that the Canadian Public provide their working conditions. Dog bites alone cost $1,000,000 the last year I heard statistics.

I apologize if I seem to be rehashing many old long-standing grievances. However the hand-writing has been on the wall for door-to-door mail delivery for decades. Extending door to door delivery to all Canadians is simply not practicable. Before the move to superbox delivery, Oakville being among the first areas so affected, 80% of Canadians already got their mail through an alternate delivery mode. Rural route delivery is no longer safe for the delivery personnel on curbed roads with 80 km/hr speed limits—drivers have been killed. Postal Codes for Community Mailbox holders give the same code to everyone in a particular installation irrespective of the street on which they live; therefore door to door delivery, or the establishment of routes in those areas would be impossible without recoding which will not be happening.

Proclammation Day [of the Crown Corporation] was celebrated more by upper management than by lowly ground level employees. Successive regimes have each felt obliged to place their marks upon our letterhead, remaining public buildings and the uniforms of letter carriers. I have shirts with at least ten different epaulets not to mention the infamous “Burger King Shirts”. No word on who came up with the bright idea of putting people who handle newsprint daily in a white shirt. And oh yes, to the delight of our ladies they became see-through if they got wet. Each bright new idea came with the dictum that wearing old uniform was verboten. Polyester shirts and pants in ninety degree weather?

During the crown corp's first years a healthy profit was reported thanks to the sale of surplus properties inherited from DPW on behalf of the old Canada Post. No one seemed to query such questionable accounting practice and since it would take a $5 million forensic audit to untangle finances based on $8 billion gross sales no one has ever called for one. Questioning minds tend to see a correlation between reported losses and years when collective bargaining is imminent.

Management types couldn't wait to get their hands on the billions in the civil service pension fund attributable to Canada Post Employees. Mind you there are probably better places to invest those funds than the Government of Canada's consolidated debt.

We may be nostalgic for what once was but I predict that when the true cost of providing door to door delivery to every Canadian is faced the political will to do so will not be there.

The most important issues facing postal service is the lack of knowledgeable leaders promoted from within the ranks and political interference from without. A crown corporation was created so that postal rate increases would not become a matter for debate in parliament. For better or for worse we are stuck with a for-profit crown corporation. Having made provision for collective bargaining management face little reason to bargain in good faith if they know they can turn to the government any time they have labour problems and get the employees legislated back to work.

Postal strikes do no one any good and we are presently in danger of facing one. That the present CUPW Contract extends to over 800 pages bespeaks an undue level of distrust.

Upper Post Office Management have become too dedicated to technological change as a solution to its challenges. Too often the needs of mail processing by computer have taken priority over delivering mail. We transport mail ridiculous distances to get it to mail processing plants. In the process too often the corporation has forgotten that its most important resource is its people. In that regard 1/3 of all employees have retired in the last decade—that's a lot of lost experience. Many have not been replaced.

If I follow my own logic here I'd have to say that the present Review of Postal Operations smacks of more political interference. Beginning with R. Micheal Warren any Post Office President who remains in the job long enough to gain even a remote understanding of the task at hand ends up getting fired or replaced because his/her handlers didn't like the message they were hearing. [Killing the messenger because the message wasn't liked.] One even ended up moving to Britain you may remember. Insanity is repeating the same process over and over and hoping for a different outcome.