Placeholder for any r/CanadaPolitics refugees
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Canada Post is a nationalized SERVICE. Why is the messaging always about how much money it loses? It doesn’t HAVE to be profitable, as it’s a SERVICE.
Cutting it up and selling pieces off is a bad idea and just fast tracks the conservative wet dream of privatizing our country.
Yes, we should still be concerned with how much a service costs though but not how much it "makes".
There should be a different measure to monitor services over time because you still want it to be as efficient as possible and not wasteful.
One year the service might cost $1 billion and the next year it might cost $1.3 billion, but it doesn't necessarily mean it lost $300 million either. It may have just been used 30% more than the first year.
But, in an example of a postal service, perhaps it made 30% more deliveries or covered 30% more distance.
We should still monitor the services though to make sure an extra $300 million in spending was actually because it performed more and not because it suddenly got super inefficient, spending 30% but only delivering 10% more packages for example.
(all numbers made up, I have no idea how much is spent on postal services or the best metrics to measure their efficiency)
I agree with the general message but, being efficient and trying to profit are two different things.
In my view this is exactly the wrong move for the company. With a little vision that logistics business could be applied to making Canada Post a major player in the Canadian retail industry. They could start up their own Amazon like platform where Canadian retailers could sign up to sell their goods. Combine it with something like prime where you pay a yearly fee for delivery and they could drive a lot of their own parcel delivery business while playing a major role in widening the reach of local retailers to parts of the country they might not otherwise be able to serve.
What's funny is that I'll probably pop back up under the Purolator brand shortly... Canada Post owns 90%+ of their stock, but Purolator gets to do all the things Canada Post cannot.
Purolator is one third of the cost of FedEx for the use cases our small business has, and is the absolutely needed third player in the shipping market (the US only has two players, Canada has three). In many ways, it is the Amazon shipping option for small businesses like mine.
I do everything I can to avoid buying from anyone who doesn't offer postal delivery. That includes paying a bit more for the product.
In 50 years of sending and receiving parcels, Canada Post is the only carrier that I've never felt was screwing me over somehow. Especially when about a third of the stuff that starts off with a courier service still ends up at the post office because they can't be bothered to deliver to the middle of nowhere.
@grte Why are Canadians still subsidizing postal rates for exporting countries and paying full fare domestically, putting our businesses at great disadvantage?
I can get a 1.00 item from around the world for a few cents yet it costs 20.00 to send the same package to the town down the road.
International parcel rates were set a long time ago, and countries that were designated "poor" had a large discount in their rates, subsidized by the developed countries.
At the time, no one imagined that China would be supplying the entire world.
@gramie Yes, exactly. It is long past time that policy be revisited instead of gutting our own postal service to keep feeding that monster.