Western Producer staff
Has the performance of Canada Post improved under the Liberals, who in opposition were sometimes harsh critics of the profit obsession of the Crown corporation?
The answer, says rural postal service lobbyist Cynthia Patterson of Rural Dignity, is a disappointing “yes” and “no.”
The Liberals began well by announcing an end to post office closings in rural Canada. However, Canada Post later let the air out of the tires a bit by ending Saturday mail truck contracts in rural Canada. It means an end to mail pick-up and delivery.
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“I would say it means the writing is on the wall for Saturday service at rural post offices as well,” Patterson said from her GaspŽ Peninsula home in rural Eastern Quebec.
“The moratorium was real substance but the difficulty is that we’d like to see it followed up and it hasn’t happened.”
Of course, to hear Canada Post tell it over the years, service and customer satisfaction have been getting better, not worse, in rural Canada.
And so it is in urban Canada, according to the post office and the private-sector accounting firm it hires to confirm this every three months.
Sitting on my desk is the latest “performance achievement report”, prepared under contract to Canada Post by the accounting firm Ernst and Young.
Despite a tough winter, “Canada Post’s performance remains high,” proclaims a press release. The Ernst and Young report says that for the first quarter of the year, Canada Post met its delivery targets 97 percent of the time.
Of course, those “standards” are quite low from a consumer point of view. Between major urban centres in different provinces, say Calgary and Regina, the Post Office does no better than promise to deliver a letter within four working days. Within the same province, say Regina and Saskatoon, three working days is the promise.
And of course, there are always the exceptions that Canada Post would say proves the rule.
On April 4, I mailed a Saskatoon-bound letter in Ottawa. It arrived six working days later. A letter mailed to me from Saskatoon April 3 fared even more poorly. It arrived eight working days later.
I suppose some Canadians have to be among the unlucky, poorly-served three percent, although this isn’t the first instance in personal experience.
Surely, a Crown corporation wouldn’t exaggerate its performance.
In any event, it has bigger things on its mind than my mail. Within weeks, the 1993/94 annual report will be tabled in Parliament and rumor has it the losses will be large. At the same time, the federal auditor-general has chosen Canada Post as the target for detailed audits.
Surprisingly, Ernst and Young, the firm paid by the post office to prepare “performance achievement reports,” reportedly has been hired by the auditor-general’s office to do the financial and “value for money” audits. Canada Post customers, rural and urban, await the results with bated breath, hoping that the standards for acceptable financial performance are higher than for mail delivery.
