On March 26, 2014
Canada Races to Enter the Ranks of the Third World
© By John Arkelian
In December 2013, Canada Post shocked Canadians by abruptly announcing a perverse plan to end door-to-door delivery for the millions of people who still have it and to practically double the cost of domestic postage. Those destructive policy plans make an insolent mockery of public service – and of Canada Post’s very raison d’être, which is to deliver the mail to all Canadians. It is an unacceptable abdication of the post office’s core responsibility. Canada Post should be extending door-to-door home delivery to everyone, not ending it for those of us who still have it! If fewer people are sending first-class mail, why drive the rest of us away with exorbitant price increases and a unilateral withdrawal of door-to-door service? Canadians would rather pay more and keep door-to-door service; or, if need be, sacrifice one day of mail delivery each week.
Delivering the mail to Canadians’ doors should be regarded as a public service; not a business decision based on profit and loss calculations. It is in the public interest to encourage Canadians to maintain their age-old custom of corresponding and sending greeting cards – keeping in touch with scattered family and acquaintances is the glue that helps bind us together. It makes us more civilized. Group boxes are insecure – they are susceptible to vandalism and mail theft – and they are enormously inconvenient for seniors, for disabled people, and, yes, for everyone else who relies on convenient daily access to incoming mail. People with community boxes often fall out of the habit of checking the boxes every day; some do not bother even checking the boxes every week! Substituting community boxes for delivery at the door thus exacerbates the alleged underlying ‘problem’ (of purported declining reliance on hard-copy mail) by conditioning Canadians to care less about hard-copy mail and to accordingly use it ever less. Far from responding sensibly to a perceived long-term trend, Canada Post has opted to ‘switch sides’ and actively drive mail users to abandon hard-copy mail altogether. It should also be pointed out that having a mail carrier walk a route serves a socially useful purpose: Carriers often greet people on their route and come to know them; in the process, they detect when something is amiss on their route – maybe a shut-in is in trouble or a home has been broken into. And, in a country whose main export in recent years has been its jobs (most of them destined for Asia in the spurious name of “globalization,” more accurately known as maximizing enrichment for the one percent at the expense of everyone else), Canada Post mail carrier positions constitute a much-needed source of good jobs for Canadians.
And Canada Post’s cries of financial hardship are clearly absurd. Canada Post ran a steady stream of full page and three-quarter page color advertisements in big Canadian newspapers, as well as commercials on prime-time television, in December 2013 and January 2014. Such advertising comes at an enormous cost in dollars. How did they find the mountain of money to pay for those pointless advertisements, if they cannot afford to deliver the mail? Even worse, all that advertising did was to state the obvious – that Canada Post delivers parcels. Canada Post may as well run ads telling us that the sky is blue! If funds are so short that Canada Post and the federal government want to cripple existing mail delivery, why waste supposedly scarce resources on redundant advertising?
And then there is the matter of the grossly exorbitant sums with which Canada Post is remunerating its own senior management. Its CEO, Deepak Chopra, “earns” $650,000 per year, including a bonus – a figure that is six times higher than it ought to be. And his fiefdom is positively bursting at the seams with senior subordinates – there is an oversized compliment of 22 vice-presidents. Who needs that many senior managers – particularly when they cannot even do the job they are paid for?
Replacing door to door mail delivery with community boxes is another step in Canada’s headlong decline from a respected member of the developed world to a Third World has-been. Henceforth, we will be the only country in the G-7 group of leading economic nations to be without door-to-door mail delivery. One suspects that we may be the only country in the much larger OECD group of developed countries to have that pathetic distinction. Canada Post has raised postal rates by a few cents every year for years on end; apparently those endless increases have not been sufficient to keep paying its top executives like kings. Now, they intend to dispense with small increases and to instead nearly double the cost of domestic mail. An increase of that magnitude is nothing short of highway robbery.
Canada Post’s plans are wrong-headed and an insupportable affront to its customers – the Canadian taxpayers who rely on Canada Post to maintain (and even improve upon) its longstanding level of excellent door-to-door delivery and affordable rates. Instead of endorsing this embarrassing race to the bottom, our inept federal government should immediately direct Canada Post to abandon its reckless plans – and insist that they fight to keep its loyal customers instead of driving them away! The moment Canada Post announced its scandalous plans, its entire cadre of senior management should have been fired, without severance compensation, for their abject, miserable failure to do the job for which they have been so handsomely overpaid. Otherwise, if the government continues to acquiesce in the shameless reduction of Canada to the postal equivalent of a Third World country, why not go the extra mile and close Canada Post entirely? If it refuses to provide its core service to Canadian taxpayers, Canada Post no longer serves any useful purpose by existing at all.
Copyright © March 2014 by John Arkelian.