We cheekily e-mailed back and asked whether we should send the cheque by mail. Within minutes, a bot devoid of the ability to detect sarcasm or irony flashed back an auto-reply warning that only electronic fund transfers were acceptable.
Here was an automated digital device communicating to us that we were not to use the non-functional services of the organization whose very existence is justified only by the presumed need to have an alternative to automated digital device communication, i.e., the mail. Being a bot, it was obviously oblivious to the key existential question raised by its own automated reply.
After the third nation-wide post office labour stoppage in 13 years, and with the latest strike effectively suspended until May but otherwise unresolved, it’s the question Canadian citizens should press on the political class. To wit: Why must we be held economically hostage every four years by the dysfunction of the irrelevant?
In the early days of the strike, the Register cited Catholic social teaching to argue against deeming the post office an essential service in order to deny postal workers the right to strike. As the corporation’s tactics have made clear, such a designation would create an even more unjust imbalance in the already destructively lopsided conditions between management and labour.
It might even provoke a return to the rank and file rebelliousness of the 1970s that led to the head of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers being jailed for defying a back-to-work order. Warnings signs were already in the air last week with Calgary CUPW members vowing they would not return to work if ordered.
But if recourse to the “essential service” designation is a non-starter, surely the current turmoil demonstrates that Canada Post in its entirety can – should? – be designated not only inessential but utterly unnecessary and, plainly, a danger to the sound functioning of the Canadian economy.
Market forces provide the measure of that danger. It’s clear and present in the $3 billion debt Canada Post has racked up since 2018 – $748 million of it in 2023 – as businesses and individuals alike opted for what Canada Post’s own bot advised the Register to do: use all available alternatives such as electronic fund transfers rather than relying on the dysfunctional, and frequently non-functional, means of communication that is old school postal mail.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has quantified the danger even more immediately by calculating that the recent postal strike cost small firms across the country $100 million a day. That’s a potential three billion dollars in lost revenue at the most critical commercial time of the year.
No wonder, according to CFIB President Dan Kelly, three quarters of small businesses plan to reduce reliance on Canada Post in the immediate future. If those enterprises are to have a future, it’s hard to imagine why they would rely on an organization whose own communications, never mind actions, designate it as ultimately unreliable because outmoded.
If that is true for business, how much more compelling is it for Canadian charities, some of which have been hampered, some badly hurt, and some decimated by the effect of the 2024 strike on vital donations? The vast majority of registered charities in this country make their year through cheques that come in the mail between late November and Dec. 31.
Part of it is because of the good-hearted generosity that Christmas giving fosters. Part of it is because donors want to make sure they get their tax receipts for the current year rather than having to wait 14 months to claim donations made from January on. The spiritual and the practical are not antithetical.
A bet even a bot would make is that charities will now make it a matter of course to do what Canada Post itself told the Register it should: go digital and transfer funds electronically. Certainly, we are urging our generous supporters to make that switch rather than being turned off from giving by the precariousness of postal service.
On that note, we warmly thank all who have donated to us, supported us, cheered us on and given us fraternal correction through the past year. We could not, unlike the post office, do without you, and wish you a blessed Christmas as we celebrate Our Saviour’s arrival on Earth.