Of course Canada Post's current business model is unsustainable -- it's is a system modelled to primarily serve paper mail from business and personal correspondence, and their service mandate requires to to operate high cost deliveries along with low cost ones. With private delivery companies, they have the option to simply say no to someone that wants to mail stuff to frozen boonie town in Nunavut. With CP, that option to say no almost doesn't exist.

And now the only sector that is seeing growth in delivery service is parcels. Amazon pays pennies to their delivery drivers to deliver the goods 7 days a week, while CP pays a comfortable wage with benefits and pension and delivers 5 days a week.

IMO this is one of the times when unions are being unrealistic with their demands. If CP's business model doesn't change with the times, the whole ship is gonna sink. But the union's mandate / insistence on "protecting jobs" means they would rather see the whole ship sink than to salvage the parts that can be salvage, and eat the losses on the parts that can't.

If I were the almighty boss -- does that make me Turd? -- I would just entice as many CP staff as I can to take voluntary early retirement / resignation with some sort of fat chicken exit meal severance package. After that, you start laying off people while offering the legal minimum amount of severance pay. And then you go ahead with the business model reform to make CP competitive to the modern environment. The goal is to get things done -- kind of like how the US gov saved GM and Chrysler from total bankruptcy. Some of the staff are going to get fired / laid off.

But of course, we are never going to see that.

Thinking Amazon taking over would do anything other than completely fuck over everyone involved sounds pretty blind to me. Nearly every idea proposed by Conservatives is equally delusional.

Scamazon is going to be the taco bell in Demolition Man movie

Even on a small business level, the only direct effect we're seeing is not being able to collect on mailed in cheques - we pick them up now which is an increase in costs for the customer/us around $10-20. Which tbh all those senile old business owners in nowhere BC should really just pay CC..

Tho that said, on a macro lens - our logistics supply chain clearly cannot handle this. Every single major courier is now experiencing service interruptions. UPS started last week, Purolator started this morning, FedEx confirmed later in the afternoon. It always seems like everything is a delicate balance here, you mess with one thing in the cog and it has ripple effects throughout the industry.

Also, inflation. Cost of goods (freight in) has increased as a result of this strike. This only translates to higher prices and it's not like the surcharges are going to come back down. We have only started to recover from the floods pricing.

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For Canadapost they also wanted to stop door to door residential delivery and roll out community posts which the union opposes cause it means less jobs.

Hehehe

If they just sold pinup posters/postcards/stamps of those Quebec ladies you guys love so much from a few pages back, RS could singlehandedly save CP.

Well yeah, that'll happen in any industry. No one has a huge surplus of excess capacity sitting unused as that'd be inefficient and cost prohibitive to do so. You'll have some excess available to handle the fluctuations, or you'll increase for seasonal changes, but you're not going to be handle the sudden events like this for long.

As another capacity example, after the Rogers 2-3 day full network outage, the Feds mandated the carriers sign assistance pacts. It's fine for a small localized outage, but if a full network outage like that happened again, the other 2 big carriers are not going to be able to handle a full 50% increase in traffic. You'll have 1 dead, and 2 almost dead networks. As it was, the other networks were hammered by Rogers devices trying to connect and getting kicked off.

Yeah, the only way would be to show them I have a flight in the upcoming weeks and they can print it out. Not going anywhere, so I guess I'm stuck waiting for my passport lol

speaking of FedEx, my Corsair RAM sticks just did more travelling than i'll ever do in the next 10 years. i wonder where it will visit between here and Winnipeg?

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...51dac417_c.jpg

That's what Canada Post is trying to do with their new contract proposal. They want to get rid of all the old timers that are close to retiring. In addition to the lower than average pay increase over 4 yrs, they also want to reduce benefits to 50/50 from 80/20, changing the pension and create a lower tier of employees, mainly partimers with no benefits to do the weekend deliveries. Just saying.

It's clear you just don't respect the job of delivering things, which is understandable as it doesn't really take any particularly special set of skills.

There are some important pieces of information about how they operate that are missing though and leading to inaccuracies.

I know several postal workers and it's essentially a private company, they receive no funding from the tax dollars and they didn't even get to vote on this strike. None of them want to be on strike. Their "union" is nothing ike what you think it is and they're being thrown to the wolves by their own management who are seeking higher compensation and bonuses and just saying that they're fighting against doing 7 day delivery when in fact a lot of postal workers wouldnt mind it because it would give opportunities for OT, create more jobs and allow flexibiliy for which days they could have off, say some weekdays instead of always weekends.

Generous wage? The absolute maximum they can make is $32.50 an hour. You think that's liveable in the lower mainland and Toronto or even Calgary for that matter? That's $63,000 a year before whatever deductions the garbage union takes.

Add in the fact that in smaller communities, ie; my friend did this when he moved back from HK to Salmon Arm, they make you use your own vehicle to deliver the mail with a pittance of a per/km claim that doesn't come anywhere near covering the costs of gas or a vehicle or the degradation of it driving all day in shit weather etc and having to buy your own business use insurance coverage

That's the real situation.

Yah, I know someone who works for CP as well and their stories reflect that. On casual for like over a year, no benefits, management somehow makes sure they don't pass certain thresholds, so an army of casuals = no full time benefits. It's a really terrible environment for many.

It used to be a pretty sweet job, I had a gf back in the early 2000's and her uncle was a posty... he loved it, they had their route and their work shift was just finishing that route. He actually ran/jogged his entire route as a way of staying in shape looked like a milion bucks even in his 40's and he'd finish his route in like 4-5 hours and be home to have a beer and get his kids from school. I remember talking to him and wanting to sign up.

Nowadays it's a complete shit organization to work for, toxic management, toxic workplace, massive routes that don't even make logistical sense... I don't know why anyone would bother, better off gig driving.

Who's ready for 1st night of Swiftcouver ??!! Do you think people are over reacting to the people and crowds downtown? I mean in the summer, our city is infested with tourists, then you got marathons and road closures, etc. ... is it to the same level as the peak summer months or will it be worst?

You’re doing literally the most mindless job possible. You sort mail and make sure an address is correct. Also the model you outlined is kind of why they are where they are lol.. after 3-4 years you memorize your route and get paid a full days wage for half a days work? Nah.. you should be picking up more work and expanding your route at that point.

At some point, a “living wage” isn’t applicable to a job that takes zero experience, education, or skill.

Unions for jobs like this just fuck over everyone involved. I think the time of unions in general is done, none of them do what unions were actually meant for other than maybe IBEW and Long shore.

I’ve been in a union now for 10 years and as a good, reliable, worker, the union has never done a thing for me other than steal my money in dues.

As you said here it’s union reps and middle management trying to hold the workers hostage for the sake of justifying their livelihood.

When you work in a public institution that is hemorrhaging money, you don’t have leverage to ask for higher wages imo. You’re already incredibly inefficient.

They don't really have a way to operate profitably though... it's one of those services that no private company will ever provide, and yet it was essentially privatized.

It's fine in a city centre with density but even the smallest communities in Canada need mail delivery, so who provides that? CP has to, at great cost vs what's being renumerated back to them.

There's no simple solution or even fiscally responsible solution in a country as vast and sparsely populated as this one. The RCMP has a similar mandate of posting officers at massive expense in places where hardly anybody lives.

I agree tho, I was same as you in a union for 20 years and 1 time I asked them for help with a fuckin horrid manager harassing the shit out of me and the steward/reps were completing fucking useless.

I would say much worse in terms of the crowds of Swifties in downtown for Taylor's first concert tonight compared to other days.

Downtown will be LIT. Swift's concert, the Canucks game against Columbus, AND people going to the Cirque Du Soleil show tonight.

Add all the Swifties in terms of local fans, and American fans coming through our border will mean a very crowded downtown for three straight days.

There are also road closures around BC Place starting from noon to midnight for today, tomorrow, and Sunday because of the Swift concerts.

Vancouver Sun:

The following roads around the stadium will be closed from noon to midnight all three days:

-700- and 800-blocks of Beatty Street between Smithe and West Georgia streets.

-Pacific Boulevard from the Cambie Bridge off-ramp to Pat Quinn Way.

-Northbound Cambie Bridge off-ramp.

-block of Robson Street between Cambie and Beatty streets.

Although Translink is running extra Skytrains, the trains will feel like sardine cans tonight with so many people going downtown for either the concert, the Canucks game, or Cirque du Soleil.

Then you add the hundreds of VPD cops for extra security in downtown too.

I think the answer has to be cutting the fat which almost certainly involves rural communities. Have once a week delivery to a mail box etc. or at the very least, costs must increase even further to justify the delivery to remote communities

Like.. even at current prices which seem high to most, I thought sending a box to Toronto for whatever it is, $25 and it gets there in 2-3 days is pretty good. For the few times I do that I’d probably pay double. But then the trickle down effect for small business etc. obviously hurts them. But then again, deliver parcels and delivery’s to hubs where the customer has to pick them up as opposed to door delivery.

I always found it interesting growing up in Fraser Heights that it was about half and half of my friends who got door delivery, and the other half had to go to those pedestal mail boxes for their mail. Make the whole neighborhood go to those boxes and your costs would have slashed instantly

Canada is too big for this model

Fuck this Taylor Swift concert. We're coming over to visit my parents and the WALK-ON reservations are already fully booked up until 9pm tonight...

Speaking from experience, you see these sticks improperly going to Winnepeg, What they do is one master code / label to clear customs and then it distributes different provinces.

Complaints are off the charts on "why is it going to MB ????" every single day but that's how C clears their customs as a whole.

Of all weekends, why would you choose this weekend to visit? Did it have to be this weekend? I've never heard of walk ons being fully booked!

Why the hell are Islanders coming to mainland for Swift ... surely, not all of them have tickets to the concert !!

Canucks playing the Blue Jackets and Lightning this weekend too.

It's not going to just be people going to the concert. I'm sure some people are coming over just to be around the fuckshow that it's going to be.
OMG I WENT TO TAY TAY AFTER PARTY AT LIBRARY SWUARE SO CRAZY

Swifties are weird, they'll clog up everything vaguely near the concerts just to be near it if they didn't get a ticket. Whatever the capacity of the venue is there's probably going to be double that in the surrounding area.