Canada Post workers declared a nation-wide strike early Friday morning last week.
Every post office across the country is closed for all but essential business — Canada Pension, EI, and Baby Bonus cheques will still be delivered.
The Director General of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services will act as a special mediator to support both sides in reaching a deal, starting Monday this week.
The Gazette switched to Canada Post delivery last year to ensure delivery to every mailbox in the County, residential and commercial.
But for two decades before that, the Gazette was delivered by an independent team of drivers and walkers. Some of them will be delivering the Gazette once again this week, and every week for the duration of the strike.
So please rest assured: the Gazette will be delivered on time, across the County. This is a well-practiced team. In town, the Gazette will not be thrown onto your lawn as of days of old. It will be available at street boxes: new ones wherever we find a good place to put them, and old ones in all the usual spots, including outside of the post offices in Picton, Bloomfield, and Wellington.
Around the County: Rossmore Stop has the Gazette on Hwy. 62. There are newspaper boxes at PECish Bakery in Milford, the Wellington Museum, Picton Tim Hortons’s, the Armoury, the Glenora Ferry, Base31’s Commissary and, of course at the Gazette office at 100 Picton Main Street. Copies are also available at Metro as well as a variety of smaller shops and businesses. Help yourself, and take one for a neighbour if need be.
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The Gazette switched to Canada Post delivery because it promised to be utterly reliable. Nobody has a network like Canada Post. They have every address, and weather-proof access to thousands of mailboxes in its local post office network in the County alone.
They also offered an excellent rate, competitive with that of the independent contract drivers who had been reliably delivering the paper for two decades.
Canada Post workers are unionized, their work stable, regular, and secure. Or it is supposed to be, at least.
Perhaps the most contentious issue of the strike concerns seven-day parcel delivery: Canada Post wants to be able to deliver parcels on weekends as well as during the week.
But to do that, it wants to contract part-time workers, who would be ineligible for full-time, unionized benefits, like double pay for working weekends and holidays.
It’s a tough issue, bringing Canada Post’s union right up against online shopping and the gig economy, twinned forces that have challenged the Crown corporation for a decade.
There is right on both sides. Canada Post’s wage offer of an 11.5% increase over four years is quite a bit below other public sector compensation packages negotiated during the last two years of spiking inflation. And the union is right to worry about gig workers taking over well paid unionized positions.
On the other hand, Canada Post is losing money at a rapid clip. The corporation says it has lost $3 billion since 2018. If letter mail is almost a thing of the past, it also faces intense competition from Amazon, UPS, and FedEx in the package delivery sector.
Canada Post announced a loss of $490 million in the first half of 2024 alone.
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