The House of Commons has returned from its winter break, its inhabitants once again seeking to feed the fires of democracy with all manner of fuel. There are the logs: the big, meaty issues that represent the long-term interests of all Canadians. These are slow-burners: natural resource exploitation, income inequality, sovereign debt. Naturally, these have been absent from the front page since long before your Editors in Chief became eligible to vote, and we don’t expect they shall return. The best we can hope for these days is kindling: the small chunks of spongy wood that crackle and spew tiny embers all over your campsite, representing bite-sized issues like abortion and foreign civil wars.
Unfortunately, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has opted for, if you follow our metaphor, kerosene: a splash that catches easily, burns brightly and warmly regardless of the weather, but sputters out just as quickly. Unless used to speed the drying of damp logs, the use of accelerants is wasteful and gratuitous: a cheap thrill.
On January 27, Mulcair announced that he intends to force the Commons to vote on the termination of Canada Post’s urban home mail delivery service. The Crown corporation’s five year plan is to slowly phase out urban home delivery, shrink its workforce by up to 8 000 people, and immediately increase the price of postage to $1 for individual stamps and 85¢ when stamps are purchased in packs. The changes came about as Canada Post projected a $104 million loss in 2014’s second quarter.
The opposition to the changes is typically Canadian. In the basic sense, Canadians are cartoonishly conservative, throwing fits when faced with change. When MP Peter Stoffer first started repeatedly introducing a Private Member’s Bill calling for the abolition of the penny years before the Mint finally did away with it, a friend of one of us who worked for a government MP communicated that the official government position on the Bill was that the penny was part of our history and should stay. This in the face of evidence showing that the cost of penny production outpaced the coin’s value, and that people routinely lost them, hoarded them, and even threw them away rather than using them.
When Parliament passed a law last year that finally ended the prohibition on interprovincial sales of wine, Premier Wynne (a Liberal!) showed her cartoon conservative stripe and refused to repeal the provincial law that does the same thing. This in the face of a clear statement from Ontario’s own vintners that they do not object to the competition at home and want to access other Canadian markets. In fact, in the face of no opposition at all, Premier Wynne’s principled position on the matter is that she doesn’t want to change the law, and that’s that. No reason, just “no”.
So no one was surprised when Mr. Mulcair raised a stink about home mail delivery: because regardless of political stripe, Canadians freak out about change. Nonetheless, for what it’s worth, the Obiter Dicta encourages Canadians everywhere to ignore the hysterics and find some clarity about the mail. Ask yourself: why do we need home mail delivery? Keep in mind that Canada Post does not propose eliminating postal service altogether, it just wants to consolidate mail delivery into community mailboxes in urban areas (rural home delivery will continue). In other words, the difference between the status quo and the future is a couple hundred metres’ walk. We’re not going to pretend that every single Canadian is as mobile as the next, but the idea that placing someone’s mail (most of which is junk mail) in a box at the end of the street is somehow going to render it unreachable is simply preposterous. We can all spare the inconvenience for the sake of saving hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
The other concern, which is less cartoonish and more typical of New Democrats, is the 6 000 lost jobs. No one is unsympathetic. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that Canada Post is already extending the transition over five years at great expense to the public, and expects to lose 15 000 employees through attrition over that period anyway. In other words, the job losses are a wash. There is no business or policy justification for shoring up thousands of positions that could be phased out through attrition so that we can continue to pay people to do things that no one wants them to do at a loss of $100 million per quarter.
To top it all off, you can still send a letter from one end of the second-largest country in the world to the other in three days flat…for a dollar. It boggles the mind that anyone would think that this is not good enough when you can send the same information the same distance in less than a second for free. Canadians, it’s time to put on your big boy boots, hike down to your community mailbox, and pick up your mail. As for Mr. Mulcair: if he’s looking for something to burn, no one reads our print edition any more.