Yeah, about that home mail delivery promise Trudeau made…

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2015 (3860 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Justin Trudeau hasn’t been sworn in as prime minister yet, but he must already be regretting one of his campaign promises, namely his plan to save home mail delivery.

The Liberals initially promised they would merely delay Canada Post’s plan to end home delivery for the one-third of Canadians who still get it. But when the NDP pledged to restore service, the Liberals revised their position and adopted a harder stance.

“We will save home mail delivery,” the official Liberal platform stated. “We will undertake a new review of Canada Post to make sure that it provides high-quality service at a reasonable price to Canadians, no matter where they live.”

There’s some wiggle room there, maybe, but not much. There’s no question Mr. Trudeau will be accused of breaking a key campaign promise if he decides Canada Post had it right all along.

And there’s the rub.

In tight races, politicians tend to reach beyond their grasp, to promise reforms and gifts to tip the scale in their favour. They’ll deal with the repercussions later, much like Jean Chrétien’s pledge to eliminate the GST or Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s promise not to introduce wage and price controls.

Such are the hazards of the will to power.

Canada Post’s plan was very unpopular in parts of Quebec, particularly Montreal, where Mayor Denis Coderre tried to demolish a newly installed community mailbox.

Of course, if Justin Trudeau had known he would win a solid majority in Parliament, he might have equivocated on the home mail controversy by promising to give it a second look, but nothing more.

Instead, he got himself into a pickle.

Two-thirds of Canadians are already using community mailboxes without any significant public backlash. Now, Mr. Trudeau is promising to treat one-third of Canadians who still get home delivery as special-class citizens. How fair is that?

Most people would prefer to get their mail delivered to their door, even if their letter boxes are frequently empty or stuffed with junk mail.

We’ve come a long way from the days when mail was delivered twice a day and once on Saturday.

Most people understand the digital revolution has made the old-fashioned post office nearly irrelevant for millions of Canadians and businesses. The post office delivered 1.4 billion fewer pieces of mail in 2014 than it did in 2006. And the downward trend is relentless and irreversible. Some futurists believe the age of paper mail could end in 20 years.

It’s left Canada Post with a business model that doesn’t work and will eventually drive it into bankruptcy. The Conference Board of Canada, for example, has said the Crown corporation is facing losses of $1 billion by 2020. That doesn’t include payments of $1 billion required to meet current pension liabilities.

Under these circumstances, it’s only a matter of time before the post office reduces service from five days a week to four or three times.

Which brings us back to the prime minister-designate.

Mr. Trudeau has two choices. He can conduct a review and then admit he made a mistake or didn’t do his research, or whatever. There’s ample precedent for such turnarounds, including his father’s about-face on wage and price controls.

Or, he can tell Canada Post to absorb the $500 million a year in savings that would have derived from ending home delivery for the last one-third of Canadians who receive it.

The decision should be easy.

It will also be another lesson for politicians on the consequences of opportunistic campaign promises.