Montreal Gazette

Playing Monopoly with tax dollars

Liberals break promise on home mail delivery

- ANDREW COYNE

You have to hand it to the Liberals. No, really, you have to, because if you don’t they’ll take it anyway. Though not before solemnly assuring you they just need to borrow it for the weekend and can have it back to you Monday at the latest.

In the latest rewrite of a key promise from their 2015 election platform (entitled, if memory serves, “Never Give A Sucker An Even Break”), the Liberals have announced they will not, after all, restore home mail delivery to those now forced to use the hated “community mailboxes,” a money-saving initiative of the late Conservati­ve government.

True, those who still have home delivery will not have it taken away — honest — but neither will those who have already had it taken away get it back. In other words, the status quo, ex-Harper. “We decided to adopt a forward-looking vision for Canada Post,” Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough explained. “We’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Hear that, Liberal voters? It’s time to look forward, and not backward to, say, October of 2015. Because, those who do might recall, toothpaste-back-putting was pretty much what the Liberals ran on. Remember? “We will save home mail delivery,” the platform promised, in bold letters. “We will stop Stephen Harper’s plan to end door-to-door mail delivery in Canada and undertake a new review of Canada Post to make sure that it provides high-quality service at a reasonable price to Canadians, no matter where they live.”

Now, it is true that when the Liberals promised “highqualit­y service at a reasonable price,” they did not actually promise Canadians, no matter where they live, that their service would improve at all. By “high-quality service” they might conceivabl­y have meant “precisely the same rotten service you are getting now.”

Likewise, when they promised a “new review of Canada Post,” did they explicitly rule out the possibilit­y that the new review would result, two years later, in the old policy? No, they did not. So no, the Liberals did not promise, in so many words, to restore mail delivery to every home across the land. They just weren’t overly concerned if people thought they did.

But never mind. Maybe the old pseudo-promise was irresponsi­ble. Maybe the Liberals are right to sort-of break it. Maybe the new semi-policy — neither expanding the use of community mailboxes nor abolishing them where they now exist, a sort of Missouri Compromise of the mail — is just the kind of nonchange the country needs.

After all, as it is commonly presented, the issue presents government­s with a difficult choice, between the responsibi­lity to provide employment for Canada Post workers — er, to provide mail service to all Canadians — and the responsibi­lity to avoid the kind of massive losses such a commitment implies. There is, we are told, a balance to be struck.

There is, if you accept the underlying premise: that only Canada Post can deliver the mail; that the mail can only be delivered at the same cost, on the same terms, and with the same strike-happy workforce and bone-stupid management as Canada Post employs. This is not true, as a matter of observable fact: private couriers will deliver to any address in Canada, where they are allowed to do so, as with packages. It is true only as a matter of statute: by law, Canada Post is granted the “exclusive privilege” — monopoly — over all letter mail to or from any point in the country. Private carriers are permitted to deliver letters “of an urgent nature,” but only if they charge at least three times the prevailing rate of postage.

This may seem irrelevant, at a time when so many have abandoned convention­al letter mail for electronic communicat­ions. But part of the reason “snail mail” fell into such disrepute is the cost and delays involved in sending a letter via Canada Post. The sixfold increase in the price of a stamp since 1981; the end of first weekend then overnight delivery; the semiannual strikes: long before community mailboxes, Canada Post was delivering the mail less often to fewer addresses less reliably at greater expense, year after year after year. That’s what monopolies do.

If we were setting up a post office today, presumably we would not grant it a statutory monopoly. Why do we still have one, in 2018? The usual reason is the “universal mandate,” the correspond­ing obligation of Canada Post to deliver every letter to every domestic address for the same price. Without a monopoly, it is claimed, competitor­s would “cream off” low-cost urban routes, while abandoning high-cost rural delivery. In time, so would the post office.

Leave aside the inconvenie­nt fact that Canada Post does not deliver to rural addresses now. Focus, rather, on that seeming throwaway line: “for the same price.” Why should it cost the same, by law, to deliver a letter, whether it is delivered across town or across the country? We don’t insist on this bizarre principle when it comes to the telephone, or air travel, or anything else, really. So why do we, when it comes to the post office?

Answer: because it serves as an argument for preserving the monopoly. It isn’t uniform pricing that requires the monopoly. It’s the monopoly that requires uniform pricing. Abolish the latter, let the price of a stamp reflect the cost of delivery, and whatever case there may be for the former dissolves.

MAYBE THE NEW SEMI-POLICY IS JUST THE KIND OF NON-CHANGE THE COUNTRY NEEDS.

People in rural areas who want the mail delivered to their door might have to pay more for it (or might not: Canada Post is hardly the benchmark of efficiency), but at least they could get it delivered. Whereas now they cannot get it at any price — again, not by circumstan­ce but by law. We are in the absurd position of enforcing a monopoly on a service Canada Post refuses to deliver.

The notion that there is a “balance” to be struck, in short, is nonsense. Ending all home mail delivery is not a matter of being “realistic,” a regrettabl­e but necessary measure to save Canada Post from bankruptcy. Neither is ordering Canada Post to deliver to every address, no matter the cost, a brave defence of public service in the face of neoliberal beancounte­rs. Both, rather, are simple extensions of the logic of monopoly: simple, and unnecessar­y.

Mail consumers should not have to pay to curb Canada Post’s losses, any more than Canada Post, or the taxpayer, should be forced to underwrite mail consumers. Open the mail to competitio­n, rather, and set both consumers and taxpayers free.

 ?? PETER J. THOMPSON/FILES ?? The Liberal government has announced that it will freeze Canada Post’s move toward community mailboxes — but the Crown corporatio­n will not resume home delivery to those who have already lost it.
PETER J. THOMPSON/FILES The Liberal government has announced that it will freeze Canada Post’s move toward community mailboxes — but the Crown corporatio­n will not resume home delivery to those who have already lost it.
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada