By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 19, 2014
As a kid, I was an avid stamp-collector. I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that before; it’s one of those embarrassing facts that aren’t hidden, per se, but which any sensible human will avoid mentioning in polite conversation. But those tiny coloured squares were my obsession for more than a few years; I carefully saved them from my parents’ envelopes and ordered them from the Canada Post catalogue with my birthday money.
Back then, stamps were around 45 cents, give or take, and steadily rose by a few cents every few years. I have an impressive collection of the 42-cent and the 46-cent stamps, each of which takes up nearly a page of its own in the slim blue volume of my stamp collection.
I stopped collecting when I hit teenhood, but I continue to harbour a secret love for Canada Post.
But the idea of a physical message medium is so retro that not even hipsters will touch it.
So, faced with declining use and increasing disinterest, Canada Post announced cuts last December.
Massive cuts.
Five million households currently get mail delivered to the door, a service that will be replaced by community boxes.
Of roughly 50,000 mail carriers currently employed, Canada Post expects to let between 6000 and 8000 go, most of whom they predict will hit retirement age and phase out of the workforce naturally.
Finally, stamps will increase from 63 cents each to an even $1 — although the thrifty eye will note they’re only 85 cents if bought by the booklets.
These are drastic changes, unlike anything Canada Post has proposed before. They all kick in at the end of March: like some kind of April Fool’s joke, the price of stamps will rise, community boxes will sprout on street corners, and mail carriers will retire left and right.
Without these measures, Canada Post says, they expect to run a deficit of $1 billion by the year 2020 — a scary number.
But technology is outpacing tradition; the feel of a physical letter is outmatched by the speed and ease of email. We don’t live in an era of mail-order catalogues and hand-written letters anymore; the average Canadian household only buys two stamps every month, and mailbags are mostly filled with bills or paid advertisements. Rarely does the mailbox hold anything the recipient is excited — or even willing — to read.
Canada Post reported a profit in 2012, but only following a deficit in 2011 — the first in 16 years, but the latest step in a progression of slowly receding profit margins. Canada Post doesn’t draw on tax dollars and doesn’t ever intend to, leaving few options for the ailing service.
But while the cuts have continued to make headlines since December, fewer sources touch on the fact that these cuts were born from recommendations found in a report from the Conference Board of Canada (CBC). Even fewer mention the other options; cuts, surprisingly, were not the only option.
Because as it turns out, Canada Post is not the only flagging postal system in the world. In 2012, the US Postal System reported a deficit of $15.9 billion. The German and British postal systems suffered the same downslide.
Rather than cut, they found other solutions.
Both Germany and Britain chose to privatize their postal systems, opening the service up to the market rather than keeping it a crown corporation as Canada has.
“By 2000, Deutsche Post had become fully privatized,” the CBC report reads. “Through attrition, the size of the workforce was reduced by 38 per cent and, by 2010, productivity increased by 20 per cent.”
It wasn’t an abrupt shift, but a gradual one that began in 1990. The effects were exactly what was expected: a smaller, more productive, more profitable workforce — but no blanket cuts.
The other popular option is to evolve the postal service to include banking services, which is fairly common worldwide; Japan, New Zealand, and half a dozen countries operate this way, and the US is seriously considering it as well. Since postal outlets are already a trusted and secure establishment, the leap from money orders to payday loans or debit cards isn’t all that huge.
But this option is one CBC dismisses without ado.
“Canada has a highly developed financial services sector that extends from large banks to small credit unions,” it states. “[T]he conditions that allowed other postal administrations to succeed in banking do not exist in Canada. Therefore, this report does not explore financial services as an option in Canada.”
The board quickly crosses out privatization as well.
“Neither privatization nor liberalization of markets is, by itself, a strategy for sustaining postal services in an environment of decline,” the section concludes.
Which leaves only one option: cuts.
I don’t have the CBC’s experience or the information they used to come to this conclusion, yet I can’t help but wonder if they could have looked a little harder at expansion rather than contraction.
Raising the price of stamps — a commodity already in low demand — may well spell the death of what little casual mail traffic is left.
Then again, perhaps we’ve truly outgrown a need for Canada Post at all. It might be time to let it go, and let it gather dust on the shelf like an old stamp collection.
