Terence Corcoran: Canada Post versus the union — Is this the last strike?

financialpost.com:

With each passing year Canada Post sinks deeper into irrelevance, its 19th-century monopoly model eroding and overtaken by the miraculous forces of innovation and market competition. There was a time when management and the unions could parlay their way through ritual confrontations unphased by competitive risks.

Consider this bit of history from a 30-year-old paper titled Monopoly and the Mandate of Canada Post. In the 26 years between 1965 to 1991, postal workers went on strike 12 times. As unions consolidated, they also gained new powers to resist Canada Post’s attempts to improve operations. Among the union gains “at the expense of Canada Post and Canadian consumers,” the most significant benefit was that “all unionized employees have job security: they cannot be laid off.”

The authors of the 1997 paper reach an obvious and prophetic conclusion: “The power of the postal worker unions to extract such a concession casts serious doubt over whether Canada Post can ever be the lowest-cost provider of competitive postal services.”

As Carleton University’s Ian Lee reports in a recent paper, Canada Post is the highest cost provider of services in an industry that has been transformed by lower-cost and innovative competitors. According to his industry sources, Lee writes that the average all-in operating costs per hour of parcel delivery at Canada Post is $50 to $60 compared with $40 to $50 at such legacy couriers as FedEx and $20 to $30 at private competitors who use gig workers.

In its core business, letter mail, Canada Post has experienced a two-decade steady decline from 5.5 billion pieces a year in 2006 to 2.3 billion in 2022. The reasons are obvious, dominated by the digital transformation of communication and financial