An advisory panel has recommended that Canada Post end the 15-year-old moratorium on rural postal closings, set more realistic goals for rural service and be prepared to privatize some rural delivery.
The high-profile panel said rural mail service should be seen as part of the Canada Post business model and not a separate public policy objective.
The crown corporation should be authorized to close at least 20 existing rural postal outlets but be required to maintain rural service levels.
And it should reconsider rural mailbox delivery since many of the end-of-driveway mailboxes are on busy highways and passing traffic creates a health and safety hazard for mail deliverers.
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“The advisory panel notes the intensity of interest in postal issues in rural Canada,” said the report delivered to government in December and made public in early May.
“The advisory panel believes that the government needs to clarify its expectations in this area to Canada Post and should subsequently communicate them to all Canadians.”
It said the government should declare that rural service is part of the Canada Post “universal service obligation” and not a public policy objective outside the USO.
It also noted that during hearings, Canada Post made it clear it wants to shed some of its money-losing rural operations.
“There is considerable anxiety in rural communities about any initiatives that appear to weaken or eliminate rural postal services,” said the panel report.
The Conservative government, with a strong rural base, has not responded to the report.
Rural Alberta MP Rob Merrifield, minister of state for transport, has been designated the minister responsible for dealing with reaction to the report.
An early reaction came from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which met quickly with Merrifield to voice concern about the rural recommendations.
“This report worries us and we made that point to the minister and to other parties,” Denis Lemelin, president of CUPW, said in a May 13 interview. “It worries us that they are suggesting opening the door to giving Canada Post the flexibility to move to private delivery from existing post offices if service is maintained. To us, that would lead to less service eventually and would be privatization through the back door.”
Overall, the advisory panel recommended that postal service not be deregulated or privatized.
Lemelin said CUPW, which represents more than 6,000 rural employees, will be vigilant in assessing how the government responds.
“This is a substantive report and this government, or the government that follows, can always pull it off the shelf and say this is a good recommendation,” he said. “We are going to be watching carefully.”
Robert Campbell, president of New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University, was appointed more than a year ago to lead the panel. It included Dan Bader, a longtime Alberta government senior bureaucrat.
The panel concluded that the rural postal closing moratorium announced in 1994 by the newly elected Liberals after a period of Progressive Conservative rural post office closings is outdated.
Rural communities have changed, modes of communication have changed and even definitions of “rural” have changed.
It said that rather than be directed by an ideological public policy that forbids rural closings, a new more practical policy should be developed.
“A new and more explicit mechanism should be developed to replace the moratorium,” it said. “It should have a clear set of rules and procedural guidelines that would both safeguard and respect the postal service needs of rural Canada while allowing Canada Post a degree of flexibility to deal with emergent issues.”
The panel recommended that Canada Post consult with rural communities on appropriate service levels, consider consolidation into nearby communities in some cases and indicate every year through its annual report what changes have been made and service levels retained in rural Canada and at what cost.
