Canada Post’s latest offer to the union representing 55,000 striking postal workers includes a number of measures from its last offer — while removing a signing bonus the corporation says it can no longer afford.
“Due to the company’s deteriorating financial situation, a signing bonus for employees is no longer on the table,” Canada Post said in a statement Friday.
This new offer will “enable the company’s modernization” while “maintaining good jobs and benefits for employees over the long term,” it said.
The Crown corporation said its offer to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) contains many provisions from its May “final offer,” including a 13.59 per cent wage increase over four years, health and retirement benefits and up to seven weeks of vacation.
A signing bonus is typically awarded to unionized employees after they sign a new collective agreement. Canada Post said in May that those bonuses would range from $500 to $1,000.
The Crown corporation also said at the time that it had abandoned its efforts to introduce a new health benefits plan, change retirement benefits and enrol workers in a defined contribution pension plan.
The two sides have been in negotiations for a new collective agreement for more than a year and a half. Postal workers resumed striking last week after the government announced sweeping changes to the corporation.
Seven days into the Canada Post strike, workers gathered outside MP Julie Dabrusin’s Toronto office to protest the proposed “restructuring” of the service. CBC’s Ali Chiasson spoke with some of those postal workers.
CUPW said in a statement that the latest proposal is taking “major steps backwards.”
“We waited 45 days for offers that are worse than what we rejected in August. Canada Post must have known that there is no way we can accept these and is clearly wasting even more time,” the union said Friday.
CUPW sent Canada Post a counter-offer in August seeking a 19 per cent raise over four years.
Canada Post has not turned a profit since 2017, losing $841 million in 2024. Last week Government Transformation Minister Joël Lightbound said Canada Post loses about $10 million a day and is on track to lose $1.5 billion this year.
Lightbound said that “Canada Post is effectively insolvent,” and that “repeated bailouts from the federal government are not the solution.”
Major changes coming to postal service
The minister said to address the corporation’s bottom line, he had instructed Canada Post to implement a number of changes that he said would allow the corporation to stabilize its finances and ensure its survival.
Chief among the changes are ending home delivery and converting the remaining four million addresses that still receive it to community mailboxes. Lightbound said the process would save Canada Post $400 million annually, and would take about nine years to complete. Those with mobility issues would continue to qualify for home delivery, he said.
Lightbound also instructed the corporation to adjust how it delivers mail, so that non-urgent post can move by ground instead of air at a cost savings of $20 million annually.
The modernization plan also includes lifting the 1994 moratorium on closing rural post offices that covers nearly 4,000 locations — many of which the government says have since become suburban or urban.
The government said it intends to maintain rural, remote and Indigenous post offices in areas where they are needed.
The changes are in line with recommendations made in the Industrial Inquiry Commission led by William Kaplan last spring.
Kaplan’s report noted that in 2006, Canada Post delivered 5.5 billion letters a year, but by 2023 that volume had dropped to 2.2 billion, despite the number of addresses in Canada increasing by three million over the same period.
CUPW said it was “outraged and appalled” by the forthcoming changes and resumed its national strike the day they were announced.
Attrition and layoffs
On Friday the corporation said that in order to implement the measures laid out by Lightbound, Canada Post has told CUPW it would offer voluntary buyouts with up to 78 weeks’ pay.
“Layoffs will only be used if other measures, including attrition and departure incentives, prove insufficient to achieve reduction targets,” Canada Post said in a statement. “Reducing the size of the workforce through attrition will always be the first choice, but it cannot be the only option through this transformation.”
Canada Post said its offer allows laid off employees to retain recall rights for two years, continue to accrue seniority and access the corporation’s supplementary employee benefits plan.
The corporation also said the moratorium on closing rural post offices, that is a part of the collective agreement, would prevent 493 post offices in urban and suburban areas from being closed — something Canada Post said is “not sustainable.”
