A woman checks for mail at her community mailbox in Montreal on Friday. Thousands of workers have walked off the job for the second time in less than a year.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Canada Post workers are facing the likelihood of widespread job losses after the federal government announced sweeping changes to the postal service in a bid to stanch its mounting financial losses.
With their roles in the balance, postal workers had few options but to go on strike for the second time in less than a year, labour experts said on Friday.
The union, meantime, is hoping that Ottawa’s plan to fully end door-to-door delivery – a politically fraught decision in the past – will help to galvanize public support for workers who have been in tense labour negotiations for nearly two years.
“They really had no choice,” said Stephanie Ross, an associate professor of labour studies at McMaster University. “The decision to end door-to-door mail delivery and the potential closure of post offices will be very significant in terms of job losses. For the union, disrupting the service is the only tool they have right now to change the equation.”
Businesses, consumers face delays as Canada Post workers walk off the job again
Can Mark Carney deliver retail politics on the mail?
On Thursday, the federal government announced a broad overhaul of the postal service’s operations, including a phased-out end to door-to-door mail delivery and the removal of a moratorium on closing rural post offices. Ottawa argues that deep restructuring of the Crown corporation is needed because Canada Post is effectively insolvent and repeated bailouts are not sustainable.
The announcement, however, took place just a day before Canada Post was set to table new offers to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers in hope of reaching a deal after nearly two years of negotiations.
CUPW called Ottawa’s move an “intervention” that caught the union by surprise, and said that it would result in major job losses. At a news conference on Thursday, Joël Lightbound, Minister of Public Works and Procurement, did not directly answer questions from reporters about how Canada Post employees would be affected by the announcement.
Steven Tufts, an expert on labour issues at York University, said CUPW was essentially ambushed by the government’s call to restructure Canada Post during a round of negotiations.
“By going on strike, they are using their last available card, which is to draw attention to the role of the post office in order to try and mobilize support at the community level,” he said.
CUPW said on Friday that the government’s directive to change delivery standard times as a cost-cutting measure (increasing it to three to seven days instead of three to four days) would end up harming mail volumes and confidence in the service.
This is the second time in less than 12 months that Canada Post workers have gone on strike. A previous strike that began in November, 2024, lasted one month and culminated in a back-to-work order from Ottawa and little progress at the bargaining table.
Striking Canada Post workers picket outside a Canada Post depot in Ottawa, on Friday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Negotiations between both sides began in November, 2023, but have been drawn out because of fundamentally different positions on key issues. CUPW wants to preserve full-time jobs as much as possible, while finding ways for Canada Post to generate revenue beyond mail delivery. For example, the union has repeatedly floated the idea of postal banking, a system utilized in many countries to serve rural populations.
Canada Post, on the other hand, is seeking to revamp the way it conducts mail and parcel delivery by hiring more flexible, part-time workers and introducing dynamic routing. This involves delivery routes that change according to mail and parcel volumes, a drastic move away from fixed routes that letter carriers currently follow on their daily shifts.
The corporation – which has lost more than $4-billion since 2018 and obtained a $1-billion cash infusion from the government to keep it afloat this year – is seeking to model its business after private delivery couriers such as Amazon and DHL, which have lower labour costs and operate around the clock.
With Ottawa’s decree to restructure, Canada Post has delayed presenting its counteroffers to CUPW by a week.
“The Liberals just took a sledgehammer to free and fair collective bargaining at Canada Post,” said Charles Smith, a political scientist at the University of Saskatchewan.
“To be clear, there are real economic pressures at the postal service. But by taking this action, the Carney Liberals have weighed into a dispute that they clearly have a vested interest in, and demonstrated that workers are, at best, an afterthought,” he said.
It is unclear as to how long this second strike might last, labour experts say. The government has repeatedly used Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code (a clause that allows it to order the Canada Industrial Relations Board to bring both parties into arbitration, and send striking employees back to work) to end strikes.
This has sparked the ire of the labour movement. Most recently, striking Air Canada flight attendants represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees defied a back-to-work order.
Prof. Smith believes that if the federal government tries to use Section 107 again, there will be nothing to stop the union from ignoring it the way Air Canada flight attendants did.
Another option to end the strike is to table back-to-work legislation and put it to a parliamentary vote.
“It is a minority government, and the Conservative Party holds the balance. So politically, it depends how [Prime Minister Mark] Carney chooses to orient himself for this kind of intervention,” said McMaster’s Prof. Ross.
CUPW might benefit by forced arbitration, notes Prof. Tufts, because the process tends to favour the status quo of a collective agreement. In June, the union had proposed to federal mediators that both sides enter into binding arbitration administered by the federal labour board, but Canada Post rejected the offer.