The Current - Frustration mounts as Canada Post strike drags on

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

As the Canada Post strike enters its fourth week, small businesses and rural communities in particular are feeling the pinch. We hear from entrepreneurs who are losing money — and one who is losing their patience — plus a labour expert who says the strike is only proving the courier to be vital.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. The Canada post-strike continues to drag on with no end in sight. Christmas is getting closer and Canadians are frustrated and fed up. When Canadians get mad, you know it's not a good thing. I understand that they're fighting for certain things, but I'm also pissed off because this should be an essential service, especially when this type of mail service is the one that's providing us with our government identification.

I hope they come to an agreement soon because it really affects, especially this time of year where people are expecting things, they're ordering things online, they're more, less patient than ever. I need Canada Post and the government to come to an agreement right now. I've been waiting for my security deposit

and pet deposit check, which is $3,000 for over a month now. I need my money. Tomorrow, it will be four weeks since 55,000 postal workers walked off the job, among those feeling the strike particularly hard, small businesses and rural communities. Dan Driediger fits both of those bills. He owns a business called Go Trekkers in Missinipi, which is about 450 kilometers north of Saskatoon. I print maps twice a week. I drive into La Ronge, which is a 160k round trip,

to ship out maps via Canada Post. And with this strike on, I can't do that. I'm in trouble. My business has dropped significantly since the strike came on by about 70%. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimates that this strike has cost businesses in this country over a billion dollars so far. Last month, as the strike got underway, we spoke with Megan Fahey. She's a small business owner in St. John's, Newfoundland, sells greeting cards and relies on Canada Post to get her products to clients. We're checking back in with her this morning. Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing a month into this? Good morning. Good morning.

How are you doing a month into this? I am surviving. Surviving. How are you surviving? Well, basically, I've just accepted that my online business is not going to make it for this quarter. And I've been focusing a lot on the local markets. What does that mean? Your online business is not going to make it this quarter. And I've been focusing a lot on the local markets. What does that mean? Your online business is not going to make it this quarter? Well, I was looking at my numbers again, and I am losing one third of my online income this last month before Christmas.

So what do you do about that? I mean, practically, it's a big part of your income. How are you making ends meet? Well, that income is just gone and I haven't been able to make it up. I've just been hustling and going out to local markets. I had a lot of local markets booked already, thankfully, because they fill up quickly. And I'm just hoping that the people are, there's a real push on right now to support local. I mean, we have local shops closing all over town, local restaurants closing. So the message is out there to support local

because you got to love it or you lose it. And I'm just hoping people keep coming out. If you were, we talked about this before, but if you were to send your cards through something other than Canada Post, how much more would it cost you? So much more. I mean, it only cost $1.40 to send a card to the U.S., which is actually my main place that I send mail. I have more orders coming from the U.S. than from Canada or internationally. I send mail. I have more orders coming from the U.S. than from Canada or internationally. And to send mail to the U.S. without Canada Post, it's over $20. It's in the $30 range.

What have you heard from customers while this has dragged on? Customers have been pretty understanding. I did have a few people reach out to me who were waiting on orders that were shipped prior to the strike. And at first, they were asking for refunds for product that is sitting in a facility somewhere. And obviously, small businesses can't afford to take that hit and provide refunds for product that will eventually reach the customer when the strike is over. So I've had to explain the situation and said, you know, if the card is no longer useful to you, you can certainly write return to sender on it. And once it's back in my hands, I can offer a refund. But while the strike is going on, there's my hands are tied.

Your sense is most people understand the situation. Yes. Yes. So the few customers that I had who reached out asking for a refund were very understanding. So then I thought better be proactive and email or message the rest of my Etsy customers and just explain the situation to them. You run a small business. Part of this is about, I'm sure there's part of it's about making money, but it's a passion play too, right? Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely, yes. Yeah. Has that been threatened? I mean, you know, you have a bit of that swan mentality where you're kind of cruising on top and beneath the surface, you're paddling furiously just to keep going.

Absolutely. I don't know if it's been threatened. It's definitely, it's just been hard. I don't know how else to say it. You just have to keep going. What about, I mean, feelings towards Canada Post and postal workers? I mean, you said before that you kind of mix feelings. You understand kind of where they're coming from. But at the same time, this is having a real pinch on you. Yeah. It is what it is. I can't really fault them for what they're fighting for. If I was in their position, I would probably be doing the same thing. Canada Post, I don't know what to say. It's just, it's a hard spot.

I can hear it in your voice. I wish you the best of luck. Thank you. And I hope that you make it through to the other side of this. Megan, thank you very much. Thank you. Megan Fahey is the owner of Driven to Ink. It's a small greeting card company in St. John's, Newfoundland. Myron Schultz is another small business owner affected by the postal strike. He's in Winnipeg. Myron, good morning to you. Good morning to you, Matt. What does your business sell and how has that business been impacted by the postal strike? Well, we're kind of an odd company in that we sell to different markets. Our main business that we do

is manufacturing products from sheepskin. A lot of that goes into the janitorial industry in both Canada and the United States, primarily in the US, actually. And then we also do products that we call comfort items, like slippers and mitts and coats and jackets and vests. Some of that goes to distributors or retail stores in Canada. We have our own

retail store and we also do online sales. And so with Canada Post out on strike, workers out on strike and parcels and products not moving, what has that meant for your business? Well, the main thing for us is, sorry, the two elements for us. One is, with most of our account base in the US, they don't understand what a Canadian postal strike looks like, or why it's happening. And we have thousands of checks that are stuck in the postal system that we haven't received from our customers. We have about 700 distributors based in the U.S. And they pay you by check? They pay us primarily by check.

A few pay by credit card, but primarily it's by check transaction. So we've got thousands of checks that are now stuck in the U.S. postal system, or Canadian postal system, I should say. And now the U.S. postal system isn't even accepting mail from our customers. So they're very confused about it. And then on the other side, where we're shipping products within Canada, the big question is, well, are you using Canada Post? Because if you are, we're not going to get our products. So we've some time ago had moved away from Canada Post for reasons that I'll be happy to share. But the problem now is that these other services are so backlogged.

We've got products that are sitting in our warehouse for a week or more that aren't going anywhere because services don't have the capacity. Just quickly, why did you move away from Canada Post? Well, one of the reasons was the cost. We found, oddly enough, that we could ship a package to a customer in Florida, for example, for the same or less than we could ship a package to somebody in Kenora or even across the city in Winnipeg. And it started to become a little weird seeing that so we had to review that and uh find other sources of uh shipping and uh it's made a huge difference for us have you run the math um you know perhaps with your eyes half closed on what this is costing you oh well it's costing us at this point it's costing us tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds, over 100 plus thousands of dollars in lost revenue that we're not taking in because these checks are just lost.

How can you bounce back from that? That's a lot of money. Well, eventually we figured either it will come in the mail or we've started going to our customers and saying, okay, we need to find another way for you to pay us. Either send us by courier service, which costs us money, or by credit card, which costs us percentage points. So in some ways it's a grin and bear it uh approach to it um and uh you know there's there's not much we can do about it obviously other than as i say go hat in hand to our customers and say please pay us by another method what frustrates you the most about this well it okay what frustrates me when i when i look at how much canada post has been losing all these years and then i see that the postal workers are asking for

more. I'm thinking, well, where's this more going to come from? It requires a far more comprehensive view of what Canada Post is going to be going down the road. Is it going to be competing with Amazon's and all the other organizations or services that are delivering packages these days? Or does it pivot to something completely different? I mean, PureLator is part of their operation these days. So I don't understand how they're even getting into this position right now. It doesn't make sense to me.

Four weeks into this, just finally, what would you like to see from the federal government? I think the federal government has to say, look, pollster workers, we're in a pickle right now. We are not going to be able to pay you what you think you're worth at this particular moment. We need to review the entire operations of Canada Post, see where you all fit into this process. But if this carries on, Canada Post is just going to shut down

because it's, I mean, who's going to use it? There are alternatives out there. Who's going to use it if it's not even operating at this critical time of the year? It's outrageous, really. Myron, it's good to talk to you. Best of luck to you in this difficult situation.

Thanks so much for speaking with us. Thank you, Matt. Myron Schultz is president and co-owner of Lambskin Specialties. He was in Winnipeg. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. But there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, an expert in labor movements and policy. Barry, hello to you. Hi, Matt. Good to be back. Thanks for having me. Good to have you back on the program. So we just heard from small business owners. You heard one of them say he wants the federal government to step in. The Labor Minister, Steve McKinnon, has said repeatedly that he won't do that. He won't do that. From your perspective, why is it four weeks into this strike at a time when businesses are feeling the pinch?

And as we heard, maybe a billion dollars thus far has been lost. Why isn't the government acting on this dispute in the same way that we saw it act with rail and port workers? I think the big issue here is that neither of the parties want it. of the parties want it. When we talked, when we looked at the ports and we looked at the rail, it was the employers basically doing a coordinated campaign to lock out their workers and then use the chaos caused by their lockout to provoke government intervention. In this case, you're hearing a lot from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. You're hearing a lot from other business groups calling for government intervention. You're not hearing it from Canada Post, though. And I think that what's going on here is because I think Canada Post recognizes that the issues that they want to resolve are not things that they can necessarily get

from a binding arbitration situation. They're going to have to fight for them, essentially. Let me come back to that. I mean, what's the bar, though, for government to step in? If the people that the service supports and services are actually being hurt by labor disruption, and the point of a labor disruption is to create a pain point so that you are able to press the issue, but if people are feeling that pain point, what's the bar for the government to step in? Well, I think the bar that we're seeing is whether the employers want it. So I think, you know, when the employers call for it and then the labor minister acts when they

don't want it, don't i mean i you know i don't have inside information about this but that's certainly the message that's coming through from the situation because yes i mean you heard it from your previous guests and you're hearing it all the time you know i mean i think one thing is important to point out here is that the the stories are really putting the lie to the issue that you know the postal service is somehow not still a vital part of the can economy, right? I mean, I think people are sort of talking about nobody mails letters anymore. But you see from the effects of this strike, the vital work that these postal workers do, right? And the fact that their withdrawal of labor is having this effect

shows the vital role that the Postal Service continues to play in Canadian society and Canadian economy. When the federal government steps in with some disputes and not others, what sort of environment does that create when it comes to collective bargaining, do you think? That's a fantastic question, Matt. And I think what we really need to understand here is that the situation that we're in is the consequence of over-reliance on government intervention and labor disputes. We need to put this in a broader context that Canadian postal workers have not been able to negotiate an agreement that fundamentally addresses their basic issues of their lives at work for well

over a decade now. And the reason for that is because the past two bargaining rounds, they've been legislated back to work. And what happens when you legislate workers back to work is that you basically put an end to the immediate conflict, but you don't resolve the underlying issues. You just kick the can down the road, and the problems continue to build, continue to build. And that's what we're seeing now, that there's all these issues that have not been resolved and then on the flip side of it you also essentially condition the employer side to expect government intervention it changes their calculus and makes them less likely to actually try to reach agreement at the table because even in these cases, because the government has now intervened so frequently in these other disputes, they

see, okay, well, maybe they're saying no now, but maybe they're going to change their tune pretty soon so we can continue to hold out, right? So it really has this corrupting effect on the entire collective bargaining process. You said that neither side wants to be forced back to work in some ways. From the Canada Post perspective, I mean, this is a crown corporation that lost something like $748 million last year. The landscape that it's operating in, it's up against a raft of companies that will deliver your package on the weekend and deliver it a whole lot cheaper than if you were to use Canada Post, certainly from a labor perspective. Where does that leave the existential crisis that

the Canada Post in some ways faces itself with. I mean, yes, people rely on Canada Post and we're seeing that, but at the same time, they have other options and the landscape is different than perhaps it was five, 10 years ago. Absolutely. I mean, there's no question that this is a time that we need to be rethinking the mission of the Postal Service. I think your previous guest was right on that. The question is, we need to ask not just what type of Postal Service we want, but what is the future for work in Canada, right? Because basically what Canada Post is, and if we just say that Canada Post is a delivery company, just like any other delivery company, then yeah, maybe you do need to follow Amazon on a race to the bottom. But if you think about Canada Post as a crown corporation that has a mission to serve all

Canadians across all of Canada, that calls for a rethinking of what they do. And Cup W, the postal union, has put some proposals on the table to rethink the postal service with doing things like postal banking or senior check-ins or something like that where where you can use this unique feature of canada post which is it has a nationwide network that reaches into every single canadian community no other courier service does that and use that for things other than delivering the mail. And so I think that what we're seeing here is these two competing visions of what the postal service is going to be

and also what kind of work is going to be like. Just finally on that, and we only have about a minute and a half left, where does the Canadian public fit into this? Four weeks into this, how much sympathy do you think, and interest does the Canadian public have for rethinking that model at a time when, I mean, the majority of Canadians aren't part of a unionized labor movement, but also they are now reliant on, or at the very least have become, you know, accustomed to ordering something and having it delivered, you know, an hour later or the next day. something and having it delivered an hour later or the next day. Yeah.

Well, I think we need to remember that labor movements, especially in Canada, have historically fought for much more than just their own members. And Cup W is really head and shoulders above many other unions when it comes to that. So many Canadians now take for granted the fact that we have paid parental leave. That came directly out of the 1981 Cup W strike, for example. And so when Cup W is taking a stand on things like two-tier workforce, which is what the Postal Service is trying to implement with the weekend delivery, trying to get it delivered by part-time workers with different lower wages, lower benefits, less predictable schedules, they're taking a stand for job quality for all Canadians, right? So we need to think about, you know, if we have an economy where the jobs on offer are these type of Amazon, you know, unpredictable, low-wage, low-benefit jobs, who's going to be buying the Etsy cards? Who's going to be buying the sheepskin products? You know, who's going to be sustaining

the economy? Who's going to be able to make ends meet? We've been talking for years about this crisis and the cost of living. If the jobs on offer are these types of part-time, no-benefit jobs, how is that going to help Canadians make ends meet? Barry, really great to talk to you again. This is something that Canadians right across the country are paying, obviously, very, very close attention to. Appreciate your perspective on this. Thank you.

Happy to help. Thanks for having me again. Barry Eidlin is an associate professor at McGill University. We did get a statement from a spokesperson for the Minister of Labour, Steve McKinnon, that says Canada Post and COPW need to reach a deal to put an end to their dispute. Canadians are counting on them. Negotiated agreements are always the best way forward.