The so-called “crisis” facing Canada Post is entirely ideological

Sikander Iqbal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

By Michael Laxer

The “crisis” facing Canada Post is entirely ideological. The "corporation's" desire to implement deep service cuts for the public and to undermine the rights and wages of its workers stems from this truth.

Since I first looked at this in 2016, the situation has predictably gotten much worse though the underlying causes remain the same.

Canada’s politicians and media have bought into a long-term project driven by right-wing notions of society and the economy that seeks to re-frame public services as “businesses” that should be run “efficiently” along the lines allegedly followed by the private sector.

While the mythology of the private sector’s supposed efficiency is nothing more than that, mythology, that is a matter for a different article. It is worth noting, however, that despite not being treated as the essential public service that it is, Canada Post is not only the only delivery or mail service available in countless remote and rural communities across Canada, but also it is required to service these areas. The government knows full well that there is no profit to be made servicing these places which is why allegedly "efficient" private delivery services don't and actually often give their deliveries destined for these spots to Canada Post.

What is abundantly clear is that by seeking to apply fictional market ideals to government run services successive governments have sought — intentionally or instinctively — to change the way the public views these services by no longer treating them as services at all.

Canada Post is run not as a public service for the public interest but as a corporation that seeks to make a profit, which is not the purpose of a public service.

Last year Canada Post posted a nearly $1.3 billion operating loss, in no small part due to the weeks long strike during the busiest time of year for mail and deliveries in the lead up to Christmas. It required a "loan" of up to a billion dollars from the federal government this year to keep it "afloat".

This notion that the government would "loan" money to a service it owns and operates it inherently absurd and underlines what is at work here. As is the fact that the postal service is framed as and referred to by the government and Canada Post itself as a "corporation".

What Corporation? Reading Canada Post press releases or the recent Industrial Inquiry Commission (IIC) report that unsurprisingly backed many of Canada Post's proposals to gut itself, you would have almost no idea that this “corporation” was government run and was, at least once-upon-a-time, designed to serve the interests of the people of Canada. Their press releases read as would any from a private company.

All of the “challenges” facing Canada Post, from the desire of management to essentially eliminate daily or all door-to-door mail delivery, to the constant increase in postal rates, to the closing of post offices and franchising them out as outlets to non-union big retailers, to its confrontational stance taken towards its own workers, to its alleged "insolvency", are driven by this notion of the postal service as a for-profit enterprise and all of them could be dealt with by changing this fundamentally flawed and anti-public service neoliberal approach.

The irony is that this ethos is even harmful to the very private sector that encourages it. Canada Post’s rates have gone up-and-up-and-up and this is very damaging to the many especially smaller enterprises who depend on it. Instead of the government subsidizing the postal service sufficiently to keep rates low, Canada Post has kept increasing rates which is obviously harmful to Canadian retailers.

The ethos is also the very basis of Canada Post’s “rush-to-the-bottom” attitudes to employees imported from the private sector that seeks to maximize profit at the expense of workers even if this leads to a socially and economically harmful labour and service disruption.

This is what creates the ideological conditions in which we see constant calls for a "more flexible model” which is a way to try to portray what are impending public service cuts as a "business decision".

These proposed service cuts are only necessary if Canada Post and its operations are driven by market forces.

And they are only driven by market forces due to the actions of Canada Post itself and successive governments that have sought to turn a critical public service into a for-profit enterprise driven entirely by neoliberal and private sector notions to transition it from acting in the public good towards preparation for privatization.

As part of the critical struggle to reverse the assault on the very idea of government and a civil society beyond the market that has been intrinsic to the neoliberal ideological austerity era, we need to fight to reconstruct the idea of the state and its enterprises and services as existing to benefit the people who own them — the public — as opposed to operating on business lines and models that are inimical to this and for which they were never originally intended.

Michael Laxer is a leftist writer and activist based in Toronto. A former NDP candidate and Spokesperson for the Socialist Party of Ontario, he is the publisher and editor of The Left Chapter.

Parts of this work appeared previously in: https://rabble.ca/labour/canada-posts-problems-are-driven-neoliberal-assault-on-public-s/

This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish (with credit) and share widely.