Is an “Unsustainable” Workload Pushing Canada Post towards Privatization?

Illustration: Chris Curtis

When Miles Farrell quit his job at Canada Post, he decided to go out with a bang.

Rather than give notice to human resources or his supervisors at the mail depot, Farrell sent a scathing resignation letter directly to CEO Doug Ettinger. In it, Farrell accused his boss of trying to break the postal workers’ union and privatize a service that’s been owned by Canadians since Confederation. 

“I cannot, in good conscience, work for a corrupt corporation that would rather starve its 50,000 employees than be held accountable,” reads the letter, which Farrell shared with The Rover.

He sent it just three days after the federal government ordered striking postal workers back on the job in December.

The Rover spoke to five of Miles’ former coworkers at Montreal’s Bridge Street depot and each said it feels like Canada Post is pushing them beyond their limits. Since going back to the job on Dec. 17, union members say they work extra hours for free just to keep up with the workload and their warehouses are badly understaffed. 

Maeve* says since returning to work at the depot, letter carriers who have to miss a day of work are no longer being replaced. Before the lockout, anyone calling in sick would have their route covered and mail delivered by a replacement worker. Since Canada Post stopped that practice after the lockout, someone who misses work will simply see their mail pile up until they return.

“I had to miss work the other day and when I came back to the depot and saw what was waiting for me, I burst into tears,” said Maeve, who did not want her real name published for fear of reprisals. “My route is usually between 25 to 40 parcels. I had 108 that day and all the usual mail.

“I love being outside and being active but this is breaking my body. It’s unsustainable. I used to love going to work. Now I dread it.”

Maeve said at the end of her day, she was faced with a tough choice: stop working after her shift was done or spend an extra two hours delivering the mail for free to avoid more work piling up the next day.

“I worked for free,” she said. “Lots of us have been doing that just to keep up with the volume.”

In an email to The Rover, Canada Post spokesperson Valérie Chartrand acknowledged “staffing issues” in Montreal and said the Crown corporation is “continuously searching for employees to fill vacancies.” They’re in the middle of a recruiting blitz, Chartrand said.

“Our local operations teams understand the importance of the service we provide and go to great lengths to work on contingency plans when unexpected absences happen.”

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Four of Maeve’s colleagues said they’ve also been working extra “off the books” hours every week to keep up with their workload. They also spoke about huge fluctuations in the volume of mail they deliver every day.

“When we got back, there was supposed to be this huge backlog of undelivered holiday mail,” said Greg*, who also works out of the Bridge Street depot. “But like, for two weeks, there were days where we had almost nothing. There would be these really weirdly easy days followed by days where we see our volume double. 

“I’ve been on the job for 10 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Similar problems have been reported across the region, according to the postal worker’s union.

“We have seen an abnormal fluctuation in the volume of mail our members carry,” said Yannick Scott, national director for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (Montreal region). “Conditions are getting harder, there was already a worker shortage and now that they’ve stopped replacing workers on leave, it’s getting worse.

“Our members are proud to offer a public service, they love their jobs but they’re starting to feel like the rug is being pulled out from under them. And now there’s this fear of looming privatization. Will they still have their jobs in a year? Two years? There’s a real climate of fear right now.”

***

After the CUPW workers voted in favour of a strike resolution last fall, Canada Post responded by locking them out. 

The union had been working without a contract since January 2024 and by November, negotiations fell apart.

The workers were asking for a 22 per cent pay raise over four years to claw back what they lost to inflation. Canada Post offered an 11 per cent pay hike. But the Crown corporation also stopped offering benefits to people on short term disability leave and wanted to change their pension plan from a defined benefit to a defined contribution program.

Another sticking point in negotiations was the implementation of “separate sort from delivery” (SSD), a new delivery system. Before SSD, carriers showed up at the depot, planned their routes and sorted their own mail before delivering it. Now, employees called “routers” spend their entire shift inside, going through thousands of pieces of mail in a neon-lit warehouse. They then hand it off to letter carriers who spend their entire shift delivering mail.

“It’s not sustainable to have someone standing in the same position sorting mail for 12 hours,” said Farrell. “I did it for five weeks because I thought it was easy overtime. It was more damaging to my body than to go out and deliver.”

Their routes are determined by a machine that calculates how many addresses and how much mail can fill an eight-hour shift. Because the carriers can’t plan their routes or go through the mail, letters get missorted and lost for longer periods of time. The machine also doesn’t account for the particularities of each route.

“The computer doesn’t factor spiral staircases, winter weather, aggressive dogs and all the little hiccups you might have on a route in downtown Montreal,” said Lela*, a letter carrier. “That extra few hours of delivering instead of sorting, it’s hard on the body. On a hot day, in a snowstorm, you might walk 20 kilometres easy. It wasn’t like that before.”

Canada Post told The Rover the switch to SSD has been ongoing since 2017 and that it encourages employees to “communicate any specific feedback and concerns about the model at a local level.”

The corporation added that local managers are “empowered” to decide to temporarily halt the delivery of mail during inclimate weather. 

***

Though it’s been months since the 55,000 CUPW members were ordered back to work by federal legislation, negotiations between the union and Canada Post only resumed this week.

Canada Post’s declining revenue and the rise of non-union competitors like Amazon have pushed the once profitable crown corporation into $3 billion of debt racked up since 2018. With the volume of letters Canada Post delivers decreasing by over 60 per cent since 2006, the Crown corporation lost its biggest source of income over that period.

“A system built to deliver 5.5 billion letters a year cannot sustain itself on 2 billion letters,” Canada Post wrote, in its 2023 annual report. “As our mail revenue drops, the cost of delivering mail keeps going up.”

The Crown corporation’s main source of income, parcel delivery, has much higher operating costs.

CEO Doug Ettinger has blamed labour costs and a drop in mail on the corporation’s financial woes. A statement by Canada Post during the lockout claimed that if it gave in to the union’s demands, labour costs would increase by $3 billion over the next four years.

Throughout the crisis, employee pay has been steady at about 50 per cent of Canada Post’s operating revenue. Capital expenditures, meanwhile, ballooned from $299 million a year in 2017 — when the corporation was last profitable — to $677 million in 2021. 

In January, the federal government loaned Canada Post $1.2 billion to stave off insolvency, sparking concerns that the country’s mail is inching closer to privatization.

“It’s certainly not an unusual way for a government to dispose of a public asset; load it up with debt, make it look like it’s not viable,” said Simon Enoch, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “We’ve seen other examples like that, BC Rail being one of them. It’s called a failure strategy and it’s been used in Canada before.”

Former Canada Post CEO Moya Greene served as Royal Mail’s Chief Executive-designate when the British privatized its mail delivery in 2013. Since privatization, shares in the corporation have flatlined and delivery times have slowed.

In Germany, which privatized its mail delivery in the 1990s, the private service evolved into DHL — a successful international logistics company that made its investors billions over the years. Workers, on the other hand, saw their wages stagnate and their benefits erode.

Union members who spoke to The Rover question some of the company’s spending, pointing to warehouses full of new trucks that have collected dust for months, an inconsistent stance on whether Canada Post wants to compete with Amazon and its half-hearted approach to reviving postal banking.

Postal banking was a major source of revenue for the Crown corporation until it was axed under pressure from the banking lobby in 1968. Post Canada released an 801-page study on reviving it in the early 2000s but that report was almost entirely redacted. One of the few lines that wasn’t blacked out called it a “win win” strategy for Canadians.

There is a pilot project that allows people to get loans through TD Bank at their local post office but its reach has been limited.

As part of their own strategy to grow revenue, the union published a plan called Delivering Community Power, that would offer financial services from 6,000 locations across Canada. The workers claimed this would be especially beneficial to rural communities that have a post office but no bank. 

The plan also calls for post offices to be enlisted as high-speed Internet hubs in rural areas, electric vehicle charging stations, community hubs in areas without gathering places and for affordable food delivery.

But so far a few if any of these appear to be of interest to management at Canada Post.

“We’re definitely worried about privatization, not only for our workers but for the basic fact that Canadians deserve mail as a public service,” said Scott. “We’re open to looking at new sources of revenue, coming up with ways to continue offering Canadians the best mail service at the best price. Management just wants to cut labour costs.”

*The sources inside Canada Post did not want their real names published for fear of reprisals.