It’s nice to see that we no longer trust privatization as a the magic wand that solves public institution problems.
That said I think the 52% support for non-union gig work in Canada Post is indicative of the mindset that needs shifting if Canada is to change course in a way that makes most people better off long term.
Source: https://angusreid.org/canada-post-privatization-strike-service-disruption-vote-union/
Yeah fuck the idea of bringing in “gig” workers.
Using Gig workers is basically saying “at will employment isn’t shitty enough”
If you need staff employ them.
I’m fine with 3 day a week mail. Even 2 days a week. But I’ll have no part of that gig economy bullshit.
It’s a service, not a business.
Fuck
It’s a service that’s mostly used by businesses to send junk mail to everyone. The letter mail stuff almost entirely consists of financial statements and bills (so also business). Since CP is losing a ton of money, they’re effectively subsidizing all these businesses with below-cost mail delivery.
When was the last time you corresponded with someone via letter mail? I can’t even remember the last letter I got. It must’ve been years ago. Why do we need daily delivery for that?
It’s a service that’s mostly used by businesses
almost entirely consists of financial statements
When was the last time you
I can’t even remember
- 4 points
- 2 of them bad-faith arguments
- 0 of them pertinent to whether a consolidated mail service with a mandate to deliver mail from and two all Canadians (even if it’s not the profitable places) is something we need to preserve as a service; just like roads we all pay to maintain that go to places we don’t need to go to.
because
when is the last time you
- drove? 2 years ago
- rode a bus? 2 years ago
- used a school? 30+ years ago
- needed police? never so far
- needed an ambulance?
- needed a fireman? 38 years ago
But I still fucking pay for those! This is a society and we do that; don’t be selfish.
Financial statements can be sent electronically. We are literally creating huge volumes of paper, spending a ton of money and creating a ton of CO2 and other industrial waste, just to send a bit of information that could’ve been an email that most people just throw away without reading anyway.
Buses and roads are used by millions to get to work/school. Police are protecting you even if you never call them (countries without credible police are extremely dangerous; police have an extremely powerful deterrent effect against organized crime). Even if you’ve never driven or used a bus you’ve definitely eaten food that has travelled on a road multiple times before reaching you (unless you live on a commune out in the country in which case you probably shouldn’t be paying taxes for all that stuff).
Anyway the point wasn’t even that there shouldn’t be a postal service, just that we don’t need daily delivery. If we eliminated non-addressed mail and made all financial statements electronic then the postal workers would be driving empty vans around town every day. We could easily switch to weekly delivery without impacting service much at all.
I don’t agree with you on mail at all. Not everything can be emailed to you. My bills are emailed/texted to me… But I still get some finicial papers, forms, and letters sent via the mail. I also get packages still delivered via canada post. You can mail in election votes. I depend on it.
The point is: do you need that stuff delivered daily? Or would it be fine if it only came on Fridays?
You made it sound like you are for privatization. I am good getting my mail once a week. As long as it is free. I depend on it.
It’s not free. It’s never been free. It’s $1.23 per letter for mail. But that $1.23 is way below cost. Canada Post lost over a billion dollars in 2024. The question is who should pay for the shortfall?
I think big companies sending out all those financial statements and bills should be paying more for postage. Others around here seem to think taxpayers should be subsidizing their postage. That makes no sense to me! We’re talking about billion dollar corporations. Why do they need a subsidy to send people mail?
What about all the packages they deliver from all sorts of businesses around Canada and the world. Most of the stuff I order ships with CP. Just received some coffee from Montreal. This should be subsidized. If freight was more expensive I would be buying a lot less from small businesses across Canada.
The volume of packages is very low compared to letters. I work in a mail room. We send out upwards of 10,000 letters per day. We also send out packages but the number is fewer than 100.
That makes sense. It is probably different for a shop that ships products to people.
It’s a service that’s mostly used by businesses to send junk mail to everyone.
Because it’s one of their revenue streams. Nationalize Canada Post, stop caring about revenue and stop delivering non-addressed mail.
Canada Post is already a crown corporation, but it is managed like a private corpo for whatever fucking weird reason.
Lots of private interests trying to get their greasy finger into Canada Post and suck it dry.
You seem to be saying that CP is losing money on their revenue-generating business facing services like flier delivery. What’s your source?
Reduce mail to 3 days a week.
TBH, if it avoids privatization and saves money, I’d be happy getting mail even once a week. Nothing we get by mail is so urgent that a few extra days will destroy lives.
In cases where something is needed urgently, there’s courier, express mail, etc. as premium options. Regular “snail mail” isn’t meant to be fast.
When public services are kneecapped to be worse than their private equivalent then people stop using them and then they turn private.
UK enters the chat with mail delivery 2x a day
Adding to the above, keep in mind that courier and express mail are useless if you live in small towns with distance to the nearest large city.
I’ve had express mail take longer to get to me than regular mail does simply because that’s how the system is set up.
I’d have no problem if urban mail took a week, while resources were used to make sure that rural service was more timely. But I also don’t know how much is spent on rural delivery vs. urban mail. I have a friend who works for Canada Post, maybe I should ask. LOL
Well that’s the thing, in some places snail mail is fast. UK for instance has places with delivery twice a day, meaning you can “courier” items across a city same day. The post offices in Canada turned to crap as soon as they started hacking the service down.
Our neighbourhood changed to community mailbox, the CP truck would pass my house and drop a notice “sorry we missed you” into the community mailbox because the package wouldn’t fit in the mailbox. And then leave and pass my house again. Not really a mail delivery service more of a notification for pickup service.
Canada is 9,984,670sq km with a population density of 4.5/sq km. That’s ~2.2m routes to see all Canadians 5-times a week.
The UK is 244,376sq km with a population density of 286/sq km. If there was universal coverage that’d be about ~1000 delivery-person-routes per day. So delivering a route is orders of magnitude easier, faster, and simpler for the workers at the Royal Mail.
If the UK only had once a day delivery they’d be 0.045% as efficient as thier Canadian counterparts.
EVEN WITH twice daily delivery the Royal Mail has less than 1% the efficiency of CUPW workers.
With that said, both face external (couriers) and internal (government) pressure to profit.
Ask yourself this: as a service to citizens of both countries, what other public services have to make a profit? National Defence? National Healthcare? National Police?
None do because privateers have already raped and pillaged those services for maximum profit as suppliers. So they don’t get lobbied the same - or even compared.
No, just Postal services with their well developed contact with the communities they serve are singled out to be profit centers for cash hungry politicians.
UK for instance has places with delivery twice a day
WTF?? What mail do you guys get that you need it delivered twice a day???
I might get something “important” (i.e. from the government) maybe a few times a month. Bills are nearly all electronic. A few packages are delivered by Canada Post, but none are urgent enough to need even a daily delivery service.
Of course, I’m only speaking for myself. Maybe there are people who still get a ton of mail, but I can’t imagine it’s the majority.
My bad, the second delivery became a cleanup delivery to deliver what they forgot or didn’t get in in the morning.
True actual multi delivery stopped in the 50s.
The UK policy is six days a week and as expedient as possible. I’m sure that is changing slowly
The postal service in Denmark was opened in 1624.
It was privatized in 2009. It will shut down at the end of 2025.
Classic capitalism. Peak efficiency
38% of people hate their communities, and want everyone but the wealthy to suffer for the crime of being poor.
A fair proportion of our population have been absolutely hoodwinked and brainwashed by the snake-oil promises of conservatism and capitalism, both of which serve only the wealthiest 1%.
38% of people are brain dead.
More like indoctrinated into self-harming beliefs. No one is born with an opinion or understanding on privatization. 🥹
Canada post is a service not a business. It should never be privatized.
This is worrying, even with the majority not wanting privatization.
Yeah. An older report by Angus Reid from 2019 cited here says that about 60% did not support privatization. That would put privatization support at the time at 40-something, since the union would like to make the opposite number as large as possible. So there’s perhaps some trend away from privatization.
Lately I think the number of low IQ people has increased from ~15% to 30%
Since COVID people have been significantly stupider.
I think it’s also made much more apparent when that demographic that had no interest in computers were forced to be chronically online due to the lockdowns and quickly found the anti-vaxx groups, and suddenly felt like their opinion matters and that everyone is an expert if they do a little bit of “research”.
Canada is being heavily targeted by Cambridge Analytica (whatever they’re called now), now that they’ve achieved total domination in the US. Please be careful! It starts with facebook and talk radio and gets very bad very quickly.
That’s why I’m on Lemmy. If I’m going to be indoctrinated. At least, I become even more a solid leftist.
Have you come across any measurements on this?
According to Oxford long covid averages a 10 point IQ drop, other sources say mild covid resulted in a 3-6 point drop.
Interesting. We should look at country IQ averages in the coming years. Would be interesting to see how these changes affect it. A lot of people had mild illness.
38 percent should go fuck themselves!
That’s a terrible fucking idea.
Isn’t that about the same percentage that vote conservative every election?
Thereabouts but don’t be fooled, this number is spread across parties. Undoubtedly heavily weighted towards the conservative parties but if there’s a breakdown you’d probably see a non insignificant proportion in the other parties.
The original article contains some statistics by party, and yes, there is a correlation between voting Conservative and not wanting to fund Canada Post. Other correlations: rural people tend to support funding Canada Post, people who seldom or never receive mail tend not to. (The rural and Conservative tendencies are going to pull in opposite directions for a fair number of people.) I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that there’s also a correlation with income brackets, but they don’t seem to have collected that information.
In case anyone wants to see some of the breakdown.
38% of Canadians have obviously never used Purcolator, our last attempt at privatization.
And if you tried to use Purcolator and they couldn’t find your house for pickup, that counts.
“Purcolator” 😂
Majority support for non union gig workers? Allow me to present my middle finger you no solidarity having, short-sighted worthless fucks.
Here in Ireland, the government postal service diversified and now also provides financial services to remain relevant and liquid. You can set up a current account with them, or withdraw cash through a post office if you already have an existing current account with another bank. I think An Post also allows you to buy bonds. They have also even entered mobile carrier service.
Other postal service in many parts of the world should follow the same model to remain relevant. These new additional and modernised services would be beneficial to serve remote communities not easily covered by mobile carriers, banking institutions and/or still rely on traditional mail service.
The Canada Post workers union has literally suggested some if not all of this.
Really? It is a shame that none of the suggestions are ever implemented.
Because there are private interests that wants to bleed Canada Post dry and fuck every Canadian over for more money.
I am always amazed at how many people do not understand this. Phone companies right before they started becoming almost “essential”, power companies, water/sanitation companies, healthcare “you know excluding eyes and teeth because they have nothing to do with healthcare” that they’re pushing to privatize, etc etc. So why does anyone think that privatizing Canada Post will be any different, and sure as shit it will be some stupid Tech company that will just have another means to amass your information to sell.
Now don’t get me wrong, there needs to be a change at Canada Post (and the CBC but that’s another topic), but privatization is not the answer, and neither is the current way it’s going. The person who mentioned how Ireland has adapted their postal service makes a valid point and it should be looked at.
Canadians will not be better served by privatization but some greedy asshole billionaire will, unless it gets bought by the employees.
Yes government organizations are rife with inefficiencies but it would be better to attempt to solve those problems.
I do not get a lot of useful mail from Canada Post, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable service for Canadians. There just needs to be less junk mail what a complete waste of resources, and why the hell do companies have the right to force their trash on me. Bet that gets better with privization /s
That’s a good service considering that around here, all the banks point of services are closing down and the only ATM left are the one charging 3-4$ per withdrawal, and I live in a populous city.
However, Postal Services shouldn’t be profitable, just like any other governmental services. It should be a fucking service.
Oh the US did that in WWII, it was apparently so good we won’t ever try it again.
Unless it’s for packages does anyone really need junk-mail delivery every day?
Most stuff has like a month for paying off statements and whatnot.
