Friday February 2 2018

The federal government’s 2016 review of Canada Post was concluded last week with Public Services and Procurement Minister Carla Qualtrough’s announcement of a vision for the future of Canada Post based on the review. The Minister presented the vision as putting service to Canadians at the heart of Canada Post Corporation’s (CPC) renewed mandate.

We’ve always been champions of more and better postal services, so even though there are some disappointments in the content of the announcement, there are some things we can work with.

CMB Conversions Stopped for Good

First of all we have to acknowledge that over four million households now know for sure that their door-to-door delivery will not be taken away. We have to thank our allies and supporters. With all their support we were able to make postal service cuts an election issue in 2015, and force the Liberals to promise that they would stop the cuts.
It’s worth remembering that also saves about 4000 or so jobs. We can be proud of that.

Still, the Liberals also promised in 2015 to restore door-to-door delivery, and they did not do so in this announcement. It’s another broken promise on their part. We will continue to work to get door-to-door restored to those 840,000 households, but we can see that the federal government is not going to act decisively on it; that fight now passes to our negotiations with CPC.
 

Government Declines to Act on Other Major Issues

The Minister’s announcement did not indicate any direct action on other major issues that we’ve been working on. So we’ll to continue work with allies in our communities to make change at Canada Post. This is no time to let up.

And we’ll deal with outstanding issues in our bargaining with CPC. Having seen this possibility coming, we have demands already on the table to expand services and diversify revenues, to deal with climate change, to pursue postal banking, and to restore and expand door-to-door delivery.

Still, the renewed mandate leaves the door open to postal banking and other service expansions, and we’re hopeful that CPC management and their negotiators will take the direction from the Minister to seriously explore more diverse services and more diverse revenues.

We should soon know what the new CEO and renewed board of directors will bring. In the meantime, we continue to pursue our vision for Canada Post head-on in bargaining with CPC.

In Solidarity,

Mike Palecek
National CUPW President