25 Sep 2025 9 min read

The Last Mailbox

What Would Tommy Douglas Tell Canada Now?

The collapse of Canada Post is not about stamps. It’s not about sorting facilities, logistics software, or quarterly losses buried in government press releases. It's about whether this country still believes in the idea of public purpose.

I can't speak for Tommy Douglas. But I can speak for what he taught me. If he were alive today, he would not be silent. He would not soften. He would not write an op-ed in polite language that pretends both sides are equal. He would stand on a stage and say it plain: You are dismantling one of the last instruments of equity left in this country — and you are doing it under the cover of efficiency, falling into the deepening shadow of fascism.

The Stage: Collapse Disguised as Reform

Canada Post just posted another loss — hundreds of millions of dollars in a single quarter. The federal government has already pumped a billion into keeping it alive. The union is blocking overtime. Overtime bans, delayed delivery, suspended neighbourhood mail. A slow bleed that looks like drift but is in fact designed demolition.

The government now calls this “transformation.” A word chosen with surgical precision. Transformation sounds visionary. It sounds like progress. But look closer at what's on the table:

The elimination of door-to-door delivery for millions of Canadians.
The closure or conversion of rural post offices — often the last civic building in entire communities.
The downgrading of delivery standards so that mail no longer flies, but crawls by truck.
A quiet shift of business volume to private carriers, who are already circling like vultures, eager to absorb the profitable corridors.

This is not transformation. It's abdication. It is the slow replacement of a public guarantee with a private patchwork.

Douglas and the Line in the Sand

When Tommy Douglas fought for Medicare, he did not do so because it was efficient. He did not build universal health care because it was profitable. He built it because he believed every Canadian deserved access — rural or urban, rich or poor, visible or forgotten. I believe we deserve the same today.

Canada Post, in its true purpose, is the same line in the sand. A system that makes the promise: no matter who you are, or where you live, you are connected. You can receive medicine. You can receive news. You can receive your pension cheque in the dead of winter without climbing a snowbank to a locked community box.

Douglas would ask the piercing question: who pays when you dismantle this? It's never the executive class in Ottawa. It's never the cabinet minister who signs the reform bill. It's the single mother in northern Saskatchewan waiting on medicine for her baby. It's the eighty-five-year-old widow in Cape Breton whose only social contact is the daily conversation with her mail carrier. It's the Indigenous community where private couriers do not deliver because “the route isn’t profitable.”

When you remove door-to-door service, you're not saving money. You are transferring cost. You are transferring it onto the backs of the elderly, the disabled, the rural, the poor. That is not efficiency. That is cruelty dressed as profit.

The Numbers Are a Smokescreen

Every headline today frames Canada Post as a financial drain. Billions in accumulated losses since 2018. Hundreds of millions quarterly. A “burden on the taxpayer.”

But numbers without context are lies.

Why is Canada Post losing money? Because letter mail volumes collapsed under the weight of email and digital communication. Because government after government has starved the corporation, stripping capital investment, denying the chance to modernise, and then blaming it for being outdated. Because the most profitable segment — parcel delivery — has been deliberately exposed to competition with global giants, while the most expensive segment — universal service to every rural outpost — is mandated by law.

It's as if you told a firefighter: you must cover the entire city, you must respond to every call, but you may not charge for the services that pay, and we will cut your equipment budget every year. And then, when the fire spreads, you blame the firefighter for “inefficiency.” I'm bad at metaphors, but you get the idea.

Douglas would cut through the noise: the deficit is not the disease. It's the symptom of deliberate neglect.

The Hidden Consequence: Erosion of Trust

Here is what the architects of “transformation” do not understand. Canada Post is not just a logistics provider. It's an institution of trust. For decades, the arrival of the mail carrier was proof that the state still saw you, still served you, still reached you where you lived.

Erode that, and you do more than inconvenience. You tell citizens they are on their own. That government is only for those who live close to airports, who can afford private couriers, who bank online, who don't need the daily reassurance of public presence.

Trust is not a line item on a balance sheet. It's the glue that holds a country together. When you close the rural post office, you don’t just shut a counter. You extinguish a public square. You erase one of the last places where neighbours meet, where the community bulletin board still carries news, where the state still has a face and a voice.

Douglas would say it flat: you cannot privatise trust. Once lost, it does not return.

The Private Temptation

The temptation is obvious: let private carriers handle the profitable corridors. Let UPS and FedEx swallow the big city parcel routes. Let Amazon build its own logistics spine. Government shrinks. Balance sheets look cleaner. Ottawa claims victory.

But this is not victory. It's surrender.

Private carriers will not serve remote Labrador. They will not send trucks down icy farm roads for a handful of letters. They will not maintain universal service when profit margins thin. They will cherry-pick. They will extract. They will leave the unprofitable zones to rot.

And once the public system is gutted, there will be no way back. The infrastructure will be dismantled. The skilled workforce dispersed. The national backbone dissolved into a patchwork of corporate service zones.

Douglas knew this pattern. He saw it in health care, where private insurers skimmed the profitable clients and abandoned the sick. That's why he drew the line: the system must be universal, or it collapses under its own inequities.

We need the line back.

What He Would Demand

So what would Douglas say now, standing in front of Canadians watching their postal system die? He wouldn't weep. He wouldn't write eulogies. He would demand three things.

Fund it properly. Stop starving the system and then blaming it for being weak. Provide the capital investment required to modernise infrastructure, digitise services, and compete in parcels.
Protect universal service. Do not abandon door-to-door delivery in the name of efficiency. Do not close rural post offices. These are not “services.” They are lifelines.
Redefine the mandate. Canada Post should not be chasing profit like a private company. Its purpose is service. Its mandate should be expanded, not contracted: banking in underserved communities, secure digital identity, national broadband support, climate-resilient logistics. In other words, build on the trust already earned to solve the real inequities of the next century.

It's a machine. Make it work.

This is not nostalgia. This, is nation-building.

The True Question

Every collapse hides a deeper question. For Canada Post, it's this: do we still believe in shared infrastructure?

Do we still believe in systems that guarantee service to all, even when the balance sheet says no? Or have we surrendered entirely to the arithmetic of efficiency, where the poor, the rural, the elderly, the inconvenient are simply written off as externalities?

Douglas would remind us: Medicare was not born because it was cheap. It was born because it was just. And justice is always more expensive in the short term. It is always easier to let the market decide. But the cost of inaction — the cost of abandoning universality — is decay, distrust, and division.

The Consequence

If Canada accepts the slow dismantling of Canada Post, here's what comes next:

A fractured nation where rural and remote communities are cut off.
A two-tier system where urban centres receive fast, reliable delivery from private carriers, while everyone else waits, pays more, or goes without.
The death of yet another institution that once held this country together — leaving only banks, telecoms, and couriers to dictate access.
A deeper erosion of trust in government, as one more promise of universality is broken.

And make no mistake: once gone, it will not return.

The Motion

Tommy Douglas would not leave us with despair. He would call for motion. Not drift. Not delay.

He would tell Canadians: fight for this. Demand that Canada Post be funded, re-mandated, and rebuilt as a 21st-century infrastructure of equity. Refuse to let the language of “transformation” disguise the truth of dismantling.

And he would look each of us in the eye and ask: is this silence because you believe the lie of efficiency — or because it hurts too much to admit we’ve already surrendered?

Canada Post is not a relic. It's not a quaint service of the past. It is a living test of whether Canada still believes in public purpose.

Tommy’s voice still echoes if we choose to hear it: the measure of a nation is not how it serves the profitable, but how it serves the forgotten.

And the last mailbox standing in a snowbound rural town is the proof of whether we still believe it.

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The “transformation” of Canada Post isn’t reform.
It’s retreat. Submission.
Douglas would call it what it is: equity dismantled under the mask of efficiency, falling into the deepening shadow of fascism.

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