Goodbye Canada Post, hello TikTok

Opinion

Good old Canada Post has not turned a profit since 2017. Like many small business owners who use their service to move goods on the cheap, I’m mired in a moral quandary.

Do I patiently forgo profit, like the current model of Canada Post, and support the 55,000 unionized workers? Or demand that Canada Post be privatized?

For just $7.19, I can ship my book, Media Brat: a Gen-X Memoir, as oversize lettermail anywhere in Canada.

What if I didn’t have to suspend my sales program until the intractable labour dispute is resolved?

Grant, my adaptable spouse and publisher, researched how to transform a print book into an encrypted eBook. Problem solved.

Canada Post is losing $10 million per day. Yet union representatives still demand a wage increase of 19 per cent spread out over four years.

In 1994, a moratorium was declared on closing rural and Indigenous post offices. Rural communities, like mine, rely on Canada Post.

Or do we?

Last week, I asked a local senior how his pension landed. “I get it deposited straight into my bank account.”

“What do you need Canada Post for?” I asked.

“I just love the flyers. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid.”

After our chat, I walked over and picked up my quarterly water bill from the town office, which, like my tax bill, used to come in the mail.

The harried clerk rifled through a massive stack of paper water bills. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to email a pdf?

But cheaper isn’t always better, is it? Like most Prairie people in their early 60s, I’m nostalgic. I still haunt the magazine rack at the local pharmacy.

Twenty years ago, Grant arranged for the robust Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail to be shipped in from nearby Saskatoon by bus. He had enthusiastically signed up a group of locals to share the cost of shipping.

In 2017, the governing SaskParty cancelled our rural bus service. Goodbye to the Saturday paper — unless we stayed over at a good Saskatoon hotel, like the Delta Bessborough.

Everything I value and appreciate is now outmoded, unaffordable or replaced by cheaper and more efficient technology.

Why send a handwritten letter when you can email, Facetime or text? If you want to “mass communicate,” there’s Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Zoom.

Canada Post is less essential every day and its profit margins have evaporated. If this Crown corporation were a person, it would be pensioned off and qualify for the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

Mature Winnipeggers will remember Consumers Distributing. You could order catalogue items by mail or line up at the store after filling out a form. A vest-attired clerk would retrieve your purchase from the back — if it was still in stock.

The thick catalogues landed in our Fort Richmond mailbox with a reassuring thud. Catalogue day must have been a boon for chiropractors since letter carriers’ mail bags bulged like their lumbar discs.

Canada’s Consumers Distributing, which began in 1957, closed in 1996 due to high operating expenses, increased competition and changing industry trends.

Prior to 1965, liquor in Manitoba was sold in the same behind-the-counter manner. In 2001, the province finally lifted the ban on Sunday booze sales.

Now Uber Eats will dispatch a two-six of Five Star rye whiskey to your door while you cheer the Bombers on TSN.

Beginning next season and following more changes for 2027, my beloved blue-and-gold will be playing on new American-based field parameters. Stewart Johnston, the new NFL-loving CFL commissioner, thinks it’s time for a change to attract younger fans.

As if these gut-churning changes weren’t enough, AI is poised to replace my underpaid freelance writing work.

I can apply for a position to teach the AI robot how to parse a phrase and work myself out of work — just like a stockroom clerk at a Manitoba Liquor Mart can morph into an Uber Eats delivery driver.

I yearn for the good old days. At 17, I would put on some blue eyeliner and be served 50-cent draft at the Montcalm Motor Inn on Pembina Highway, which is now a condo development.

Here in my small town, I’ll be able to point out to local children how the empty building on the corner is where we once retrieved our letter mail and deeply discounted Temu packages.

“What happened?” they’ll ask before a ding notification robs me of their scant attention.

“Sit down, turn off your iPhone and I’ll tell you a cautionary tale of increased competition and outmoded technology.”

Patricia Dawn Robertson is a freelance writer and remote creativity coach in small town Sask. who welcomes feedback at PatriciaDawnRobertson.com.