Commentary
In the 1980s, American science fiction author David Brin and Canadian business professor Ian Lee were both separately deep in thought on the nature of postal delivery.
Brin was writing his dystopian novel “The Postman,” later made into a film by Kevin Costner. Lee was composing his 850 page doctoral thesis on—as the subtitle puts it—the “origins, growth and decay of the state postal function.”
This week, more than half a million Canadians are learning that their postal codes will soon lose door-to-door mail delivery and transition to community mailboxes. It’s a good time to reflect on our relationship to our postal services, with the help of Brin and Lee’s respective contributions.
“The transformation to restore and renew Canada’s postal service is now underway,” Doug Ettinger, Canada Post president and CEO said in announcing the latest round of changes.
“We’re working hard for Canadians because they deserve a postal service that is strong, stable and fits their needs. The path forward is clear as we re-establish Canada Post as a vital institution focused on serving an evolving Canada.”
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It’s hard to see how the move to community mailboxes restores, renews, or re-establishes the struggling postal service. Retreat is more like it.
The community mailboxes are one of the measures that Ian Lee recommended in a 2024 report titled “Canada Post is at The Tipping Point.”
The key points, as Lee summarizes it, are “lifting the moratorium on rural post office closures; ending door-to-door delivery in favour of community mailboxes; introducing dynamic route scheduling; and allowing Canada Post flexibility to hire part-time employees.”
Dynamic route scheduling uses technology to create new routes daily, sending postal workers to areas based on ever-changing volume and demand rather than fixed streets. This is a perfect task to assign to AI and generate immediate results.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) is against any change that recognizes their role in society is declining. Their website landing page welcomes visitors with a giant “hands off my postal office” sign in red.
What they want to do instead, according to another slogan is, “Stop the cuts. Expand services.” The expanded solution they want is postal banking—where every post office is transformed into a public sector bank branch.
If you live in a place like downtown Toronto, with multiple bank branches on every corner, the idea seems bizarre. CUPW, though, says that “thousands of towns and villages across our country do not have a bank. But many of them have a post office that could provide access to financial and banking services.”
They note that Canada Post did in fact operate a national savings bank until 1969, so it’s not entirely new terrain.
It still sounds like quite a stretch. Canadians are now served by a growing number of financial institutions with increasingly accessible digital tools, even if physical branches are declining. Aren’t we just delaying the inevitable for a vanishing institution?
The idea of the postal system anchoring itself to another trusted institution—our banks—makes a bit more sense when you consider the broader ethos of the postal worker in North American society.
“The Postman” is about what happens after an apocalyptic event destroys all technology across America. The protagonist discovers an old postal worker uniform and travels from town to town, bringing news that postmen are leading an effort to restore a structured United States government and reignite modern life as it was once lived.
The story is false—the man is a lone wanderer with no broad network of colleagues, but it becomes true because the people want to believe in it. Other people then take on the task of deputized messengers, becoming postmen, to spread the news.
When society falls, the value of the messenger becomes clear. The postal worker is the vanguard of civilization. The novel is a romanticization of this idea, but it is still ingrained in the spirit of the postal system.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” is one of the slogans of the U.S. Postal Service. We can chuckle at the declining relevance of the postal service when all we get is fast food advertisements that we immediately throw in the garbage. But there was a time when the postal worker brought word of the most serious matters.
As the plot of “The Postman” warns us, maybe that time will come again. If the grid goes down, social media platforms and AI companies will just vanish. The postal service may remain.
The taxpayer shouldn’t have to keep bailing out Canada Post and the service shouldn’t take on new lines of business just for the sake of self-preservation. Ian Lee’s recommendations are wise counsel.
Canada Post is clearly in need of modernization, but at the same time let’s recognize there’s a value to the service that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
