Canada to Stop Delivering Mail to City Homes Over 5 Years
December 12th, 2013Via: New York Times:
Canada’s postal service said Wednesday that it would cease home delivery over the next five years, and substantially increase postal rates.
Though Canada would become the first Group of 7 country to end all residential mail delivery in cities and older suburbs, Canada Post shares many problems with postal services in the United States and elsewhere, including rapidly declining mail volumes and high wage and pension costs. Along with the service cuts, the government-owned service said it would eliminate 8,000 jobs, mostly through attrition.
“A leaner work force will create a more flexible and competitive Canada Post,” the post office announced in the summary of a five-point plan. “Canada Post has a mandate to fund its operations with revenues from the sale of its products and services, rather than become a burden on taxpayers.”
In place of home delivery, Canadians who live in cities would have to pick up their mail and parcels at so-called community mailboxes, which would be established in neighborhoods across the nation. (Apartment-dwellers would continue to pick up their mail in their buildings.)
While the service argued that the communal boxes had “advantages for busy Canadians,” the announcement was swiftly and widely criticized by opposition politicians and labor leaders, who noted that the price of a stamp bought in a booklet would increase, to 85 cents from 63 cents.
The projection Canada Post’s management is using is based on the decrease of third-quarter letter volumes from 2011 to 2012. If one remembers, 48,000 postal workers were locked out at the end of the second quarter in 2011. Thus, 2011 third-quarter mail volumes were inflated as the mail piled up during the lockout was delivered in the third quarter.
This whole saga at Canada Post smacks of something ripped from the privatization playbook. A public service is cut to the bone in the name of cost-saving. These cuts decrease the quality of these services and as a result the public supports wanes. This softens the ground for the right-wing to call for these unpopular and ineffective public services to be sold off at bargain basement prices and privatized.
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/dave-bush/2013/12/battle-canada-post-and-future-our-public-services