Weekend work a key sticking point between Canada Post, workers

Canada Post spokesperson Jon Hamilton says the postal service is in trouble and trying to hold onto the past is a ‘death sentence.’

Weekend work remains a glaring obstacle in negotiations between Canada Post and its employees, who have threatened to walk off the job Friday in what would be their second strike in less than six months amid an “existential crisis” for the institution.

Under the current collective agreement, mail carriers must be paid extra for shifts on Saturdays and Sundays, which are relatively rare.

Canada Post is pushing for a corps of part-time workers to be deployed on weekends in response to rising parcel demand.

A more “dynamic” approach to scheduling and routes would also allow the Crown corporation to shift from a delivery model that revolves around letters to one rooted more firmly in the growing market for packages, said spokesman Jon Hamilton.

“We see it as adding some part-time work to our largely full-time workforce so that we can provide things like weekend delivery that right now we have to do paying overtime,” he said.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has backed a purely full-time model that would move existing employees onto some weekend shifts.

“It’s making it so inflexible and so set in stone. And the delivery world changes on a dime,” Hamilton said. “We’re trying to find balance.”

The union has said its goal remains new contracts for its 55,000 members and a sustainable postal service.

It noted recently that a federally commissioned report, released Friday, proposed “dynamic routing” and part-time positions for weekend delivery and extra weekday volume with similar pay rates, benefits and pension plans to full-time positions -- and with gig work off the table, unlike at many courier services.

However, union president Jan Simpson said in the Friday bulletin that the recommendations “amount to service cuts, contracting out and major rollbacks to important provisions in our existing collective agreements.”

Any service changes must be addressed as part of a broader “public mandate review,” she said.

The 162-page report by William Kaplan, who headed the commission, homed in on Canada Post’s flagging business model and put forward foundational reforms, including phasing out daily door-to-door letter mail delivery for individual residences while maintaining it for businesses.

Asserting that Canada Post faces “an existential crisis,” Kaplan wrote that long-standing moratoriums on rural post office closures and community mailbox conversions should be lifted as well.

But issues such as daily delivery, renewed post office shutdowns and additional community mailboxes all fall outside the scope of collective bargaining, said Steven Tufts, a labour geographer at York University.

For that reason, talks between the two sides now hang largely on weekend delivery.

“This is where it hinges, the future of CPC (Canada Post Corp.),” Tufts said. “That’s where they’re stuck at the moment.

“They’re both in agreement that they need weekend delivery; they can’t agree on how to get there.”

The union informed management Monday afternoon that employees plan to hit the picket line starting Friday morning at midnight, halting delivery of nearly 8.5 million letters and 1.1 million parcels per weekday, based on 2023 figures.

No new items would be accepted until the strike ends, while those already in the system would be “secured” but not delivered, Canada Post said. Social assistance cheques and live animals mark the two exceptions, with delivery of both continuing -- though no new animals would be let through -- it stated.

The disruption would deepen the company’s growing financial hole. It notched an $845-million operating loss in 2023, part of more than $3 billion in before-tax losses since 2018.

The organization secured a $1.03-billion federal loan in January.

The strike could also dent other organizations’ bottom lines.

B.C.-based charity Union Gospel Mission saw a $300,000 drop in revenue late last year due to the last postal strike, the organization said.

Overall, it resulted in an estimated $1.6 billion in losses for small businesses, according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

Large shippers have “already been moving their items out of our system,” Hamilton said.

Last year, the strike prompted tens of thousands of small businesses and individuals to turn to private carriers for delivery of their packages -- and not all of them turned back.

Local delivery platform Trexity saw a 320-per-cent increase in merchant sign-ups ahead of the work stoppage, said Alok Ahuja, CEO at the six-year-old startup.

The retention rate was “virtually 100 per cent,” he said.

“We’ll continue to see an uptick as more news and more of these reminder emails comes in that there is a looming strike.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 20, 2025.

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press