Canada Post faces two futures—a revitalized public service or a billionaire cash machine

_{Originally published on The Breach, on Oct 1st, 2025}

Last week, Mark Carney declared the post office “not viable,” and announced plans to cut door-to-door delivery.

The government intends to replace postal workers with community mailboxes, speed up deliveries through subcontracted gig labour, and quietly hand over profitable routes to private couriers.

And yet a renewed Canada Post, harnessing its crucial public infrastructure, is a textbook example of the kind of “nation-building” project Mark Carney claims he wants to champion.

As postal workers walked off the job last week in protest of his plans, media headlines obsessed over deficits and delays, leaving out the bigger story: who is profiting from the disruption—and who is paying the price.

That context is crucial: billionaires stand to gain enormously from gutting Canada Post, and their hidden role is shaping the entire fight.

Door-to-door delivery is actually in higher demand than ever. But this essential service is increasingly handled by hyper-exploited workers rather than postal workers. They labour for mega-corporations like Amazon and other union-busting tech firms, driving around in polluting vehicles and adding to congestion as countless fly-by-night subcontractors race to squeeze every last ounce of speed from their burnout-bound workers.

Trump-backing billionaires like Jeff Bezos are raking in enormous profits from this mistreatment of workers—profits extracted at the expense of commute times, bike lanes, and the environment. At the same time, government officials solemnly declare that Canada Post must scale back door-to-door service and cut rural post offices.

But while billionaires and their political allies push privatization, Canada Post holds the tools to do something far more ambitious. Beyond delivering letters and parcels, it could become a hub for community services, a source of local economic empowerment, and a model for public infrastructure that meets the needs of Canadians rather than shareholders.

Pay no attention to the billionaires behind the curtain

All this union busting, polluting and street-clogging is concealed inside a veritable Matryoshka doll of performance-based subcontracting relationships. Rather than hire employees and risk the possibility that they might unionize or demand basic rights, companies like Intelcom (which delivers a significant portion of Amazon’s packages in Canada) hire unnamed firms run by opportunistic entrepreneurs.

These firms may even subcontract to individuals on a per-parcel payment scheme. The result: people whose livelihoods depend on rushing around, jeopardizing not only their own safety but also that of the neighbourhoods they serve.

Amazon’s model isn’t just replacing postal jobs with underpaid gig work; it’s setting a new floor for the entire industry. By pushing wages down, normalizing algorithmic surveillance, and treating workers as disposable, Amazon forces competitors to mimic its tactics just to survive. When the government frames the issue as making Canada Post “competitive,” it’s really saying postal workers should endure the same speed-ups, precarity, and union-busting that define Amazon’s operations.

Media outlets and commentators, meanwhile, are playing stenographer to the supposedly sober assessments of Canada Post’s viability as a business. A recent CBC panel concluded that the union can’t win a debate about the financial future of Canada Post. Perhaps. But these same observers are helping obscure the players who stand to benefit from the government’s anti-worker offensive.

Pay no attention to the Bezos vassals hiding in plain sight! Don’t mention their close links to the Liberal Party! This seems to be the credo of journalists and commentators covering Canada Post.

You don’t even have to crack the lobbyist registry to see what’s going on. Intelcom, for instance, is headed by “Minister of Innovation” Mélanie Joly’s brother, Jean-Sébastien Joly. The Liberal Party’s alliance with union-busting the postal services is literally, in this case, a family affair.

But the double-teaming of postal workers by the two Jolys is hardly an exception. A quick look at the registry reveals lobbying of the government from delivery services like UPS, retail giant Amazon, private logistics firm Pitney Bowes, and several banks (more on that in a second). Our supposedly declining postal service is attracting a great deal of attention from corporate lobbyists.

To justify its accelerated de facto privatization program, the government is fond of saying that Canada Post is “losing $10 million per day.” This claim is dubious on its face, based on a year defined by unresolved labour disputes and large one-time costs. More telling is the double standard: no other public service is evaluated this way. How much, for example, does the Canadian military “lose” per day? The answer: $169 million.

Should we accept the short-sighted and somewhat absurd proposition that the value of universal postal infrastructure is limited to its ability to earn a profit? Of course not. But even if we did, the notion that Canada Post could be made viable by retreating from unimaginably profitable parts of the economy—while sacrificing accessibility for Canadians—is equally ridiculous.

As postal workers face down a government in league with the worst abusers of labour and the environment, it may be the visibility of these connections to billionaires that determines whether this priceless public service survives. Needless to say, in the high-stakes strike that began Friday, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers deserves our support.

To get to Canada Post’s bright future, we must travel the last mile

As corporate media outlets dutifully echo the government’s talking points about a postal service in need of de facto privatization, the innovative proposals that government-appointed managers have ignored for years get too little attention.

Postal workers are among the most attuned to Canada Post’s need to adapt. Walking between houses or on breaks from sorting packages and letters, they have generated plenty of bright ideas. Under the banner of Delivering Community Power, they collected some of the best of these proposals.

They didn’t just put these proposals on paper; they ran a national campaign, staging vibrant actions at post offices across the country to help imagine the post office of the future.

A few of their proposals, covered in more depth in The Breach last year, include postal banking, power generation and rural charging stations, checking in on seniors living at home, and turning post offices into community hubs for the delivery of public services.

Postal banking is perhaps the clearest example of how Canada Post could secure new revenue while serving unmet public needs. Yet both Liberal and Conservative governments have refused to greenlight it, fearing a confrontation with Canada’s big banks.

If Mark Carney was serious about investing in nation-building, these are precisely the kinds of proposals he would embrace. Instead, we get the same tired program of union-busting.

The best way to save Canada Post is simply to enforce basic labour standards, environmental limits, and safety regulations on the rogue fleet of sub-sub contractors with Liberal ties. But that approach would require the kind of approach Liberal governments specialize in watering down until the reforms are effectively meaningless.

And there’s another element of their bold proposals that cut to the core of the government’s current attack, and it poses the biggest challenge yet to the business model of the American billionaires’ Canadian vassals.

Giving Canada Post a monopoly on last-mile deliveries, coupled with good wages for workers, would enforce labour standards, reduce congestion, improve neighbourhood safety, and redistribute the unearned wealth of American robber-barons.

It would also mean a direct confrontation with some of the biggest political machines in Canada. But once they are seen for who they really are, we may find they are not as powerful as they seem.