End of door-to-door service should just be the start for Canada Post: Report
Call for three-day-a-week service, end of postal monopoly.

thestar.com
July 23, 2015
By Vanessa Lu

Canada Post’s sweeping plan to cut costs, including the end of door-to-door home delivery, is a good start, but even more drastic changes are needed, a new report says.

“Postal volumes are declining dramatically, which reduces the need for five-day-a-week delivery for individuals,” writes Carleton University professor Ian Lee in a study, Is the Cheque Still in the Mail?, to be published by the MacDonald Laurier Institute on Thursday.

He urges a three-a-day week service for residential customers, along with an end to the existing postal monopoly, franchising all corporate-owned postal outlets and hiking prices to cover costs.

The post office has already begun to move ahead with a switch to community mailboxes, a move that has garnered complaints and protests across the country, and even a sit-in in Hamilton.

Both the NDP and Liberals have said they would reverse that change, promising to keep mail delivery at the door, though they have not said how they would pay the estimated $500 million annual cost, the report said.

Lee notes that only 32 per cent of households receive such service, with 27 per cent using a community mailbox and 25 per cent using a locked box such as those found in apartment buildings, with the remaining 16 per cent being rural households or those who use post office pick-up.

“It would be returning service to the wealthiest neighbourhoods like Rockcliffe in Ottawa, Outremont in Montreal and The Beaches in Toronto,” Lee said in an interview of the potential reversal.

“As we get into the full campaign (of the federal election), there will be more attention paid to this,” he said. “This promise may backfire on them. It is not treating all Canadians equally.”

As more people switch to digital bills and payments, Canada Post’s letter mail will continue to drop.

“In the last five years, a quarter of their business has vanished to electronic options,” Lee said, and another 25 per cent drop is expected in the next five years. Even Ottawa is using direct deposit instead of mailing out pension or government cheques, he noted.

“The tipping point will be reached by 2020. Parcels are going to exceed letters,” he said. “I’m not calling for the killing of the post office, but to prepare it to go from a letter carrying organization to a parcel post/courier business.”

Even though postal unions are trying to maintain service and jobs, Lee noted that 15,000 of Canada Post’s 60,000 workforce is scheduled to retire by 2020, so downsizing can occur without layoffs.