For as long as she can remember, Lorraine Muller has wanted to be a letter carrier. She loved playing grocery store as a kid, organizing different objects into neat little rows. Maybe it was that love of order—the rhythm and the structure—that drew her to the postal world. Maybe, she jokes, it was the Sesame Street song “People in Your Neighborhood,” which valourizes community-focused work like delivering the mail. Now, as she talks about her early days on the job in Montreal, she conveys sincere pride in being a letter carrier—a job built on the backbones of public care. “I think I was built for it,” Muller says. “I’ve developed casual relationships through small talk and by giving a hand every day in my duties as a public servant.” 

Muller has been a full-time letter carrier for Canada Post since 2017. In her eyes, letter carriers play an essential role in communities across the country. They bring important pieces of mail—pension slips, birthday cards, bills, medication, parcels, you name it—but for some residents, especially isolated seniors,letter carriers are also a familiar face, perhaps the only one they see in the day. “I had one very high-anxiety customer who was always worried about getting his bills on time,” Muller describes. “I was the only person to maintain my patience with his requests, and it helped him develop a strong trust bond with me. I reassured him constantly, because I knew that’s what he needed.” It takes time, usually many years, for a letter carrier to work up to “owning” a mail route—that is, driving, walking and delivering mail to and through the same borough every day. It’s a kind of consistency every letter carrier works toward. Once you own a route, you start to see the same people, learning the rhythms of the neighbourhood, and, most importantly, you know when something feels off. “One of my colleagues once tended to an elderly person who fell,” she says. “He stayed with the person until the ambulance showed up, and continued his route after that. As a letter carrier, you hear those kinds of stories all the time.”

For Muller, this feeling of responsibility is part of why being a letter carrier is so meaningful. It’s also part of what she, along with many of her fellow letter carriers and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), believes is being systematically stripped away by Canada Post’s upper management. From her vantage point, in recent years, Canada Post’s corporate echelon has been favouring efficiency over human connection. 

At the heart of the ongoing Canada Post labour dispute, which became a country-wide concern during the late 2024 postal strike, lies a deeper battle over the future of public services in Canada. The Crown corporation is grappling with serious financial distress, facing possible bankruptcy due to a decline in letter mail, an increase in addresses serviced, and an arguable lack of planning for the future. Meanwhile, postal workers, represented by CUPW, are pushing back against Canada Post’s automation-driven reforms. CUPW’s vision includes expanding into services like postal banking and elder check-ins, while management eyes streamlining. The clash has broad implications: it’s not just about sorting and delivering mail, but about what Canadians expect from public institutions in an era of austerity and stark inequality. Canada Post’s reforms indicate a markedly different vision for the company from the union and many of its letter carriers, several of whom tell Maisonneuve that new innovations in the workplace are undermining the integrity of their jobs. 

Case in point: the Separate Sort from Delivery (SSD) system. Historically, letter carriers would sort their own mail each morning before going to deliver it. This not only eased the repetition of the day, but also gave the letter carriers’ legs a rest before walking up to twenty kilometres on their route. Under the new SSD system, letter carriers no longer sort or prepare their mail—instead, a “router” sorts it in the depot.The two or so hours that letter carriers previously dedicated to sorting are two more hours on their feet delivering mail. As of 2024, 164 facilities are using the SSD system, per Global News. In December 2024, the company told Global News the reason behind the newer system was “to meet the changing needs of Canadians while reducing congestion inside and outside of our depots and creating a safer workplace for our employees.” The Canada Post Corporation declined interview requests from Maisonneuve for this story.

In Canada Post’s 2023 sustainability report, the corporation states that the frequency rate for lost-time injuries decreased by over fifteen percent compared to 2022. But Muller says that in some instances, SSD creates a more precarious form of work for letter carriers. Mail delivery is already a physically demanding job. “I have one friend who is on burnout leave,” Muller says. “He was doing overtime every single day just to get his route finished. There’s no more variety in your day. No more mental balance.” The union predicted these outcomes and strongly pushed back on the SSD system as Canada Post started to roll it out in 2017. In a June 2025 CUPW newsletter opposing SSD, the union states that “Canada Post needs to prioritize the work-life balance of its employees, not just the operational needs of its network.” Muller adds that the system breaks the chain of custody over the mail and information about clients. When letter carriers sort their own mail, they know the addresses of their customers based on consistency. “Now, as a letter carrier who delivers, you have no idea who has address changes or whose mail is being held,” she says. From Muller’s point of view, the SSD system removes any possibility of providing a personalized service. “A lot of us take it to heart, and we’re very proud of our jobs and we care very deeply about our customers, so it was a big blow to have that imposed on us.” 

The SSD system aligns Canada Post’s operations with private companies like Amazon, which use versions of the system. In 2024, Canada Post provided a statement to CBC stating: “For the last two years, Canada Post has been executing a comprehensive transformation plan” that “positions the company for growth in Canada’s e-commerce market.” “They completely idolize a company like Amazon,” claims Oliver Martins, a full-time letter carrier in Montreal. “Why are you making me work three times as hard? ‘Cause I’m already exhausted, man. We’re all exhausted,” he adds. Martins applied for a letter carrier job at Canada Post six years ago. Even though the first year was chaos—jumping from route to route and learning a lot on the fly—the mental benefits of working outside appealed to him. He started posting about his experience as a letter carrier on TikTok and updating the public about some of the new changes to the job, like SSD, giving him a burgeoning profile as a TikTok persona, though he’s since removed the videos. 

Barry Eidlin, a labour expert and associate professor of sociology at McGill University, says the company’s vision for the future, and particularly the focus on parcel delivery, fundamentally “lacks imagination.”Trying to compete with private delivery companies, he suggests, is a guaranteed race to the bottom. Because Canada Post has to provide service to all, it can’t selectively work with high-volume clients like other delivery companies. “They are up against these multinational corporations that can draw profits from other companies, so they can take a loss to out-compete Canada Post, to try to get market share,” Eidlin explains. “They’re competing on an inherently unequal playing field if they continue with this vision.”

In a recent contract proposal, which was rejected by close to 70 percent of CUPW members in early August, Canada Post also stated there would eventually be a “limited implementation,” meaning ten facilities, of a new system called Dynamic Routing. With Dynamic Routing, machines and software would build delivery routes and assign them to letter carriers daily. Carriers would no longer “own” a specific route. Instead, the constants would be their schedule and general geographic area. A Canada Post news release in May 2025 described Dynamic Routing as optimizing delivery routes daily, “creating more consistent, predictable service for customers.”

“They are coming after something called ‘trapped time,’ which is the time in which letter carriers aren’t doing anything,” says K, a letter carrier in Ottawa speaking about his job under condition of anonymity. “If you have an area that is covered by eight letter carriers, they think that, with Dynamic Routing, you can do it with six letter carriers.” K is concerned that the system will eventually be expanded beyond the proposed ten facilities, and Dynamic Routing will become normalized. 

In a June 2025 newsletter, CUPW says that with Dynamic Routing, letter carriers should expect heavier workloads. The new system would also “give management the power to reassign work tasks to any carrier if there is a glitch in the software.” For CUPW, Dynamic Routing is “about squeezing as much work out of carriers as possible in the full eight hours every day of the year.” Martins says the whole point of moving up as a letter carrier is to earn your own route. “When you start, you’re kind of running around with your head cut off. Once you get your route, you’re more familiar,” he explains. “They want to just strip that away, so it’s like, what am I working towards now? That’s the whole point of seniority.”The company has stated that seniority will still have implications for work under Dynamic Routing.

For Muller, this newer delivery business model contradicts then Minister of Public Services and Procurement Carla Qualtrough’s 2018 vision for the renewal of Canada Post. In a news release, the federal government emphasized improved public service and better relations with workers and unions. Qualtrough outlined a “service-first vision” for Canadians, stating that the company would “significantly expand its accessibility program” helping “seniors and others with reduced mobility access their mail.”Canada Post’s Board Chair at the time, Jessica McDonald—later interim CEO—also called for a “focus on a collaborative and positive relationship with Canada Post’s employees and the unions that represent them.” Qualtrough also referenced the use of new technologies and an evolving customer base, but there was no explicit mention of competition within the e-commerce landscape.

Peggy Nash, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), points to a mismatch between how Canada Post management currently envisions the Crown company and how it’s intended to function. “I think part of the problem for Canada Post is that it has been told to operate on a business model,” she says, “and yet, from its earliest days, it has been a public service.” 

In 1763, as the gunpowder of the Seven Years’ War settled and the British draped their flag over the battered remnants of colonial New France, settlers mapped a new kind of infrastructure—not of forts or battalions, but parchment. The empire’s cartographers traced routes with couriers, along the winding artery of the Saint Lawrence, down to the rocky harbours of Halifax. As the frontier settlements grew, the nature of mail began to shift. The post could not stay only in the hands of officers and administrators when people themselves hungered for connection. By the early nineteenth century, a postal worker on horseback or aboard a rickety railway car was a familiar and welcomed symbol in even remote corners of the British territories that would become Canada. 

Since 1908, the year it delivered the first free rural mail in the country, Canada Post has been, first and foremost, a vital public service. At the time, it was still operating under the Post Office Department, a federal entity run by the Canadian government. By the early twentieth century, demand was booming, and mail delivery went from once-daily to multiple drops per day in some Eastern Canadian cities. In rural areas, carriers trudged through snowbanks and forded rivers, linking farms and villages to the national grid of correspondence. By 1927, through airmail, Canada Post’s services extended to Manitoba and eventually Vancouver. By 1956, the Yellowknife Post Office was established in the Northwest Territories. Today, the corporation’s mandate includes a “universal service” obligation, matching the text on the side of every delivery truck: “From anywhere … to anyone.” In Canada Post’s 2023 financial report, the corporation states that it charters more than 280 flights to Northern and remote communities in Canada every week. Parcel delivery in remote and rural areas is also 40 percent higher than in cities, while other delivery companies rely on Canada Post to complete “last-mile deliveries in these smaller communities.”

In the post-war era, parcel volume increased exponentially, and new technologies—like mechanical sorting and postal codes—began to reshape the system. Still, the Post Office Department was struggling with inefficiencies, rising costs, and an inability to modernize at pace. Then came 1981, a pivotal year. Under Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the department was transformed into a Crown corporation and officially became Canada Post. The idea was to make the service more autonomous, more competitive in the marketplace, and self-sufficient. Canada Post has, since 1981, been required to operate on a financially self-sustainable basis, meaning that it must generate enough revenue to cover expenses and avoid taxpayer support for regular operation. Any profits are re-invested into the corporation. In the decades that followed this change, as email began to replace handwritten letters and most bills went paperless, Canada Post pivoted toward parcels. The e-commerce boom turned the Crown corporation into a delivery giant once again, and it began to compete with private companies like Amazon in the age of online retail. 

It hasn’t been an easy road. “There is a long history of labour relations at Canada Post, and it goes right back to 1965,” says David Camfield, a professor of labour studies and sociology at the University of Manitoba. At the time, postal workers didn’t have a union or collective bargaining, but they took labour action upon themselves and went on strike. That wildcat strike won the workers the right to collective bargaining, and since then, Canada Post has faced regular labour disputes. Some of these disputes have not only resulted in historic wins for CUPW, but all Canadian public service workers, including paid maternity leavein 1981, which set a national precedent for federal civil service bargaining units. Debates between CUPW and management over door-to-door delivery, privatization threats, and service cutbacks have been ongoing for years. In 1987 and 1991, the Letter Carriers’ Union of Canada (which would later merge with CUPW) engaged in rotating strikes protesting the corporation’s plan to privatize postal offices and eliminate door-to-door delivery. Both strikes were ended by special government legislation, but the 1991 strike resulted in half-hour paid meals for workers and a childcare fund to assist parents with young children. “There’s always been a history of aggressive managers and a militant union,” Camfield adds.

Those dynamics set the stage for the current flare up, which exploded in a blaze with the Canada Post strike of November 2024. When the new employee contract was up for renewal, the union came to the table with clear demands: a 23.79 percent wage increase stretched over four years, cost-of-living protections to keep pace with inflation’s relentless creep, ten paid medical days to guard against the wear of the job, a guaranteed forty-hour work week, and firm ground rules for the growing expectation of weekend deliveries. Canada Post countered with roughly half the raise—11.5 percent—and carried its own burden of calculations: how to reshape a legacy service in a world increasingly ruled by e-commerce, where parcels never sleep and delivery is expected seven days a week. 

On November 15, 2024, letter carriers, sorters and postal workers across the country walked off the job, demanding fair wages, safer working conditions, and the right to retire with more dignity. As the strike began, Martins’ mornings no longer started with the ritual of sorting his mail and packages before hitting his route. Instead, he joined the steady march outside Montreal’s Bridge depot, boots grinding salt into the pavement, his CUPW strike sign tugging in the wind like a sail. The depot behind him sat hushed, a concrete slab filled with undelivered mail and resentment. Strike pay trickled in, but it wasn’t enough—he had to pick up another job, trying to stay ahead of mounting bills. He didn’t picket out of anger, he says, but survival, solidarity, and something harder to name: the need to be seen and heard. 

As the strike stretched on for weeks, millions of parcels and letters were held up during a busy holiday season, while solidarity built between CUPW and its members. “I do think going on the strike did a lot to unify people a little bit,” K says. “I met people, like those on the picket line that I had just seen around the depot, but never talked to. Now, we talk about what is going on with the job and the union.”

The thirty-two-day strike ended after the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) ordered postal workers back to work on December 17. Camfield says this “aggressive intervention” by the federal government—which had directed the CIRB to assess the likelihood of an agreement by the end of the year before determining if an order was appropriate—came precisely at a time, during the Christmas holidays, when CUPW had more leverage for bargaining. The strike was suspended until the spring. In the last five years, the Canadian government has also used part of the Canada Labour Code, specifically Section 107, to force an end to strikes in the Canadian railway and ports industries and, most recently, in the airline industry (an order defied by Air Canada flight attendants). “Canada Post management could reasonably assume that this was going to happen,” Camfield adds. “This means they have no real incentive to bargain and reach an agreement.”

Eidlin agrees, saying that both Canada Post and CUPW expect the government to step in as a “knee-jerk” reaction to strikes. Back-to-work legislations have been “baked in” to the collective bargaining process since the early 2000s, Eidlin adds. He notes that since the 1980s, of the unfair labour practice charges filed with the United Nations’ International Labour Organization against G7 countries, over half are in Canada. “A functional and healthy collective bargaining apparatus requires a robust right to strike for workers as its foundation,” Eidlin says. “Once you take that away with government intervention, you are poisoning the labour relations climate for Canada.”

In May, Canada Post came back with a new offer to CUPW, containing a wage increase of 13.59 percent over four years, still much lower than CUPW’s original ask for a raise of 24 percent over four years, to match inflation. “What if we could just have a raise that matches inflation, but like, real inflation?” Muller says. “What if we could get back to the salary we had five years ago?” Also in May, CUPW implemented a nationwide overtime ban until an agreement is reached, still in effect as of publication. “We have been consistent in our demands,” says Yannick Scott, CUPW national director for the Metro-Montreal region. “Fair wages, health and safety protections, job security and an expansion of services to communities.” 

Canada Post’s offer also outlined a shift to expand part-time work to cover weekend parcel delivery, something currently only done during peak seasons like Christmas. During the Industrial Inquiry Commission (IIC), a public hearing designed to solve the Canada Post labour dispute in January and February 2025, CUPW presented an eleven-page report showing that using full-time employees would effectively save Canada Post money, by reducing costs associated with worker benefits. (By their calculations, part-timing the work would mean a 600-750 percent increase in headcount benefits for Canada Post.) 

Canada Post has regularly claimed to the media that they are hemorrhaging money, citing an operating loss for the year of 2024 of “nearly $1.3 billion.” In this context, it would seem that CUPW’s proposal would be a saving grace. But Canada Post is a self-funded corporate entity, and because of this, the IIC report by commissioner William Kaplan calls many of CUPW’s suggestions unrealistic, arguing that “given the financial crisis, Canada Post must focus on saving its core business, not on providing new services.” Kaplan, acknowledging that Canada Post has made some “bad business decisions,” also notes: “Canada Post does not exist to provide CUPW members with employment. It exists for one reason: to deliver letter mail and parcels to the people of Canada.” He recommends phasing out daily door-to-door letter mail delivery for individual addresses and establishing community mailboxes wherever feasible, as well as the hiring of part-time workers under “the same terms and conditions” as regular employees.

Stoking the fire even further, in late June, the new Minister of Jobs and Families, Patty Hajdu, ordered employees to vote on Canada Post’s final contract offer—slightly enhanced from the May version. They voted it down. Now that the workers have decisively voted “no,” there are a few possible outcomes. One is arbitration—a neutral third party legally deciding the fate of the new Canada Post contract. The other is more negotiations between CUPW and Canada Post. But Camfield says that if another reworked contract still pushes for part-time workers on weekends, it holds an important implication. “There’s this degradation of work going around, and a lot of people in CUPW are worried about the thin edge of the wedge, right? If they give ground on part-time on weekends, it’s not going to stop there,” he speculates.

What’s unfolding at Canada Post is not just a postal skirmish, but another flashpoint in a much larger, slow-burning crisis of work. The precaritization of labour—once primarily the anxiety of freelancers and gig workers—has seeped into sectors formerly synonymous with stability. When public services operate like businesses, the conditions of labour change; the current standoff between the union and Canada Post has implications for workers in healthcare and education, and the future of work itself.

While contract talks with Canada Post dominate headlines in mainstream media, a more profound conversation is happening below the surface of sound bites and careful public statements—one that reimagines the role of the national postal service altogether. Through their bold online public ad campaign “Delivering Community Power,” the union is making the case for a future where post offices become community hubs and postal workers deliver more than just mail. Elder check-ins, for example, are one of the new services that the union suggests, a structured and action-based version of the connections already built into the job for carriers like Muller. The union imagines a workplace where door-to-door postal workers are allotted extra time on their routes to check in on seniors or people with mobility issues who sign up for the service. 

Since 2016, one of CUPW’s proposals has concerned postal banks—publicly owned financial services offered at post offices across the country, designed to serve rural, remote and underserved communities abandoned by commercial banks. “For the last twenty years or so, the big banks [have been] pulling out of smaller communities, leaving people without any access to banking services,” Nash says. “But every community, no matter how small, has a post office.” Per the Financial Post, the big six banks in Canada earned a total adjusted profit of $58.7 billion dollars in 2024. According to CUPW’s Delivering Community Power homepage, even with “affordable low-fees” for customers, these postal banks would be a way for Canada Post to carve out a small slice of that $58 billion. “Imagine if Canada Post had two percent of that market share. That’s a billion dollars a year,” Muller says. Scott points out that the country has more post offices than Tim Hortons franchises. “We should take more advantage of this wonderful network,” he says. “We want to strengthen our public post office to meet the evolving needs of the public.”

Postal banks aren’t a new concept. Canada had postal banks for over a hundred years, and, per CUPW, in 1884, there were hundreds of post office savings banks, with a balance of over $10 million from nearly sixty-seven thousand accounts. Countries like France, Switzerland and Italy still have postal banks. Canada’s postal banks shut down in 1969, and a 2013 report by the CCPA notes a likely link between that fate and the lobbying efforts from private banks trying to gobble up the competition. Today, commercial banks focus on the most profitable clients, while many vulnerable people end up resorting to predatory payday lenders. “By definition, you’re excluding portions of the population, and that goes even more so when you think about more rural and more remote populations,” Eidlin says. “That’s an example of, when these kinds of market failures aren’t serving Canadians, this public service can step in.” 

Canada Post knows about postal banking. Starting in 2009, the corporation conducted a secret four-year study on it. Ottawa outlet Blacklock’s Reporter obtained a heavily redacted dossier of research on postal banking through an Access to Information request. The results seemed to indicate that getting into banking services would be, per the dossier, “a proven diversification strategy” and “could be a win-win” for the corporation. So why would Canada Post bury a seemingly positive report that they themselves funded? Eidlin says that the decision not to pursue postal banking is similar to those of private equity firms, comparing it to the bankrupting of the Hudson’s Bay Company. “They basically load these companies up with debt, declare bankruptcy, and then they can sort of sell them off for parts,” he says. “They get their payoff, but then they destroy these institutions.”

Canada Post’s view of itself is notably different. The company is pushing for a workplace defined by package delivery, automation and flexibility, all in the name of improving the company’s finances. In the corporation’s 2020 annual report, Canada Post said that during the global pandemic, Canadians “fast-tracked their online shopping habits by a few years,” making the company accelerate its shift into the e-commerce world. In May 2024, Jon Hamilton, spokesperson for Canada Post, also told Global News that the corporation envisioned “e-commerce in Canada to double over the next ten years,” and that Canada Post needed to be “better positioned to get as much of that growth as possible.” But e-commerce’s boom is already here: the International Trade Administration stated that in as early as 2022, there were “over 27 million e-commerce users in Canada, accounting for 75 percent of the Canadian population.” It’s easy to see why Canada Post wants to align with e-commerce standards, a growing marketplace where the company could become a more attractive partner to Canadian retailers. “That’s kind of the future of Canada Post: to be more efficient and less humane for letter carriers,” says McGill business professor Karl Moore. “There’s a certain hardness and coldness in today’s world, unfortunately.”

In Canada Post’s 2024 annual report, the corporation states that letter mail volumes have continued to decline while “transaction mail revenue fell by $105 million, or 5.3 percent, in 2024.” As the company faces mounting losses and a messy contract negotiation, letter carriers are raising questions around the Crown corporation’s financial transparency—especially in light of its reported $3.8 billion in losses since 2018, a multibillion-dollar investment plan with few public details, and its connection to direct competitor, Purolator. The company’s 2023 annual report describes a rapid shift in competitive delivery, particularly in the post-pandemic landscape, putting negative pressure on its financials. “As the landscape has shifted from mail to parcels, cracks are rapidly appearing in the foundation of the postal system,” the company writes.

Canada Post’s public financial reports are slim on details about how the company is spending its money. In 2022, Doug Ettinger, the president and CEO of Canada Post, said there was a “five-year plan” to invest more than “$4 billion to improve our network, increase our capacity, keep our people safe, and green our operations.” The announcement didn’t specify the fate of that $4 billion, but it’s possible that $470 million of that went into the Scarborough, Ontario, Albert Jackson Processing Centre, which Canada Post calls “a leading-edge parcel sorting facility.” 

Muller feels the company is being intentionally vague about its finances. The company has declared close to a half billion loss each year for the past five years, with revenue declining since a high point in 2021. “When they talk about operating losses, there is no way to parse out what is really included in that,” she says. Muller created an open petition in early June on Change.org, calling for Canada’s Auditor General and Public Sector Integrity Commissioner to conduct “performance audits and forensic financial audits” into Canada Post’s financial dealings. At the time of publication, the petition sits at 1846 signatures. CUPW’s Scott says that the company is leaving out key details, such as one-time payments to settle past violations of pay equity laws, crafting a “self-serving” narrative around its finances. Per Scott, the company also failed to take necessary preventative action to address declining letter mail revenue. 

Not all delivery companies are facing the same financial burdens: the Canada Post-owned parcel delivery service Purolator, which doesn’t deliver any letter mail, is doing quite well, recording a profit before tax of $294 million and rolling out over a hundred electric vehicles in 2024. Canada Post bought 75 percent of Purolator for $24 million back in 1993 and now owns 91 percent of the business. In addition to Canada Post’s majority ownership of Purolator, Ettinger currently sits on the company’s board. “Unusual,” is how Moore describes Canada Post’s Purolator ownership. “I do understand why they did that, because they were trying to go where the future is,” Moore says. “But they are separate companies, Purolator and Canada Post. Purolator is in a different game in the parcel business, and they’re doing it well.” Many letter carriers, like Muller and K, believe that this Canada Post tie-in to Purolator hurts the union’s negotiating position, given that Purolator can benefit from Canada Post work stoppages. A November 20, 2024, press release from Purolator emphasizes that it is “well prepared and ready to deliver continued success for our customers, and all Canadians, including those who have been impacted by the recent Canada Post labour disruption.” 

Amidst financial hardship and as it attempts to compete with private delivery companies, Canada Post is investing in technology and equipment. In 2023, the company bought a new fleet of C250 mail delivery trucks, designed by the Michigan truck manufacturer, Morgan Olson. These C250 trucks are being eyed to replace the classic boxy red gas-powered Grumman trucks in use today, as Morgan Olson develops an all-electric version of the vehicle, part of the company’s goal of electrifying the fleet by 2040. Some letter carriers in depots and driving the new C250s, though, have found them to be faulty. T, a letter carrier who worked in a Thunder Bay, Ontario, depot and spoke on condition of anonymity, said there were safety issues when he drove one two years ago. “They work on this electrical key fob system, and they [the trucks] really want to lock,” he says. “You walk away, and they automatically lock. And they’ve locked a few of us in … I was locked in for about twenty minutes once, and I had to drive back to the depot.” Sometimes, the C250s would also shut down after parking, and the letter carriers or supervisors would have to use a backup fob or reset it manually. “It was normal to carry around a screwdriverand take apart the fob, take the battery apart and then put it back together, which restarts the system and electromagnet charge. You would think they would have researched this before giving us a bunch of vehicles,” T says.

The C250s are also much longer in length than the Grumman trucks. “They’re behemoths,” T says. “They take up a lot of room, and it reminds me of a Hummer.” Instead of shelves like on the Grummans, the C250s come with a configuration of slides, rollers, and pull-out trays to support the grey lettertainers, the Canada Post term for the bins designed for holding envelopes. But according to T, there is not a lot of space for parcels. “The Canada Post mantra moving forward is parcels, parcels, parcels and letter mail is dying,” T argues. “If you had seventy to eighty parcels or more at Christmastime, you would have to shove them into these spots where these lettertainers are going, and they would get stuck. So some letter carriers are carrying around pokey sticks because the parcels would get stuck up top.” Canada Post did not respond to questions from Maisonneuve about the C250 trucks.

Many of these decisions—the SSD system, Dynamic Routing, the design of the new C250 trucks—seem to have been made without the livelihoods of the postal workers at the core. “I feel like that’s something that is really missing,” K says. “They’re not thinking about how we [letter carriers] might react, and definitely not thinking of how we might view these decisions as just a complete lack of trust.” A lack of trust between involved parties could be what’s preventing Canada Post from working with CUPW on a vision of the company that benefits its finances as well as the community. What needs to happen to get back to the Canada Post that postal workers like Muller took pride in?

Eidlin says Canada Post’s role needs to be completely reexamined. “Is this a service where profitability must be the top criterion?” he asks. “You never ask if the public school system is running a profit, or our hospitals, or fire departments. There are certain things where, as a society, we basically determine that these are fundamental services provided in the public interest, and we’re going to fund them.” That’s not to say it would be easy to implement this vision, given the postal service’s current structure as a self-sufficient entity. But there is public support for some of CUPW’s suggestions. A recent survey by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute found that out of four thousand people, 72 percent say they would support Canada Post branching out into other services like banking. The poll also found that while most Canadians support adding non-union workers to Canada Post, if needed, 66 percent are opposed to cutting worker benefits for union members in efforts to reduce costs. 

The same forces pushing postal workers toward precarity are grinding down healthcare and public transit, too. Piece by piece, since the neoliberal pivot of the 1980s—when Canada Post was spun into a self-funded Crown corporation—Canadians have watched public goods be recast as burdens on the budget, instead of pillars of collective well-being. Now, with the new Liberal government already pledging to cap public spending, the stage has been set for further erosion. The creeping privatization of services like mail delivery doesn’t just mean fewer good jobs; it means a shrinking of the commons, a dismantling of the idea that certain public services should belong to all of us. There are two key players in the labour dispute—Canada Post as a business and CUPW as a union—and what improves workers’ quality of life doesn’t always align with what improves a company’s efficiency. But that doesn’t mean that these two interests are diametrically opposed, nor is it a zero-sum game. 

For Muller, a transformative change in direction needs to happen at the leadership level. “You can’t go into a future if you’re going in with the same people who are trying not to give you a future,” she says. There are a few ways that the future could look. In one version, a part-time contract letter carrier drops deliveries in a community mailbox on a “dynamic” route, with no idea who might be receiving what and little security as to when their next shift might come. In another, the letter carrier’s routes still wind through snowbanks and apartment stoops, past corner stores and community gardens, but the rhythm feels different—less like a grind, more like a pulse. A knock at the door brings a familiar face, a moment to ask about the bad knee or if the medicine’s lasting—small gestures that carry weights no algorithm can measure. The routine remains, but the context has changed. Every stop on the route is a reminder that postal work is part of a social contract, a system that serves the public good—delivered daily, wrapped in municipal flyers, prescription refills and the slow, steady work of rebuilding trust door by door. ⁂

Stephan Boissonneault is a freelance writer based in Montreal. He reports on music, arts and science. He also directed the documentary It Could Only Happen Here.