CUPW has announced an immediate strike, and postal workers are currently walking off the job.
The minister of public works, Joel Lightbound, has announced his intentions to implement all of the recommedations laid out in the Kaplan report, including permanently ending door-to-door delivery and the requirement to deliver mail 5 days a week.
Not sure how he expected labour to respond to 1/3 of the workforce being made redundant.
A postal service is a service. As in, it exists to benefit the citizenry, and for no other reason. A profit margin was never meant to be a part of that.
Bring Canada Post back into being 100% a crown corporation again. Make its mandate to be a service centre, and not a profit/revenue centre.
It is a crown corporation. I guess you want (and I wan it too) to be a brought back as a federal government department.
At some point, that’s just lighting money on fire.
I disagree. Why do we need to burn billions of dollars a year, in funds that could be better allocated to health care, building hospitals, education, whatever else, fighting opioid addictions, crime, green infrastructure investment, I could go on and on.
Or you know, we could spend that cash to continue to perpetuate something that’s obviously pretty broken, only to continue to flood everyone with piles of window washing advertisements and Subway coupons.
But what about the elderly, you ask? Whelp, Grandma is going to have to figure out how to get her bills electronically, and how email works. If you want to send or receive postcards, etc., you probably don’t need instant gratification for that. You can wait for a week, and pick it up at the community box. Let Canada Posts ownership of Purolator take care of the packages from online shopping.
It’s time to be realistic here.
Zero-sum arguments are the Overton window that the wealthy and powerful have permitted you to debate within. The premise you bring forth here is both ridiculous and intellectually insulting, not the least because it wouldn’t even be an issue if the wealthy just paid their fair share.
Do better.
With what? No computer, no clue how to use one, no real ability to learn, requiring dozens of hours of professional instruction to get the simplest workflows which are forgotten within a few days of non-use, constantly at risk of scams and phishing because she has absolutely no experience with the Internet, and absolutely no interest in learning when she’s already 95% done her lifespan and has difficulty even remembering what day of the week it is.
It’s like you being forced to spend outrageous amounts of money on an electric car simply because someone else decided to stop all gasoline production and distribution in Canada.
Fact is, everyone deserves to have access to all traditional communication, be it phones (you pay for that) or Internet (you also pay for that), or snail mail (also, paid for). We need a fundamental mode of communication that is not restricted to a privileged class simply because they can afford it, and whom everyone can make use of with almost zero resources.
That’s the written word, on paper, passed along via a public service that exists to enrich everyone, and not just those who are already fantastically wealthy.
Some sums are zero. Federal spending, once whatever debt accumulation is factored out, is one of them. Pretending it’s not is what happened to Greece.
Why do I need to “do better,” when I have an opinion? You may not agree, and I respect that. A good debate here is how we can progress as a society when it comes to issues like this. Hurling insults at each other doesn’t do that. I understand you may be personally affected by this, like I mean no disrespect or it’s not like I lack compassion for that, I have compassion. But I’m also a realist, we cannot just endlessly burn cash like this on these crown corps because people can’t adjust to new realities. That’s not a so called rich person perspective either, it’s again, a realist one.
Capital is not endless, we do not want to turn into the United States, where we endlessly face government funding shutdowns and unfathomable defecit spending because we shred money like they do. It’s important we run our assets efficiently, and when you are burning billions a year on mainly delivering junk mail to people, it’s kind of mind boggling. That’s not zero sum, it’s common sense. Bills only come (usually) but once a month, if you need to correspond with someone, why does that need to be delivered every day, individually, with hand to hand service?
I’m not for the complete elimination of snail mail either, it still needs to exist. They’ve laid out a path for it to exist, but it’s going to necessarily look a lot different than we are used to it looking. It’s the logical path forward.
I would say buyout purelator and start a nationalised Amazon competitor.
Canada Post started it and them immediately sold it to Deloitte.
Mail has changed which is true, before physical mail funded the whole thing, now things need to be changed.
I don’t get why we can’t have a system where if you receive CPP or disability payments or something else, you can register with Canada Post to have home delivery but others don’t get it or pay to have it?