ADAMS: Avi Lewis’s Canada Post comparison is sentimental nonsense

There is a particular genre of Canadian political rhetoric I find particularly tiresome. It is the rhetoric that mistakes sentimentality for principle, that deploys false analogies to shield failing institutions from legitimate scrutiny, and that treats any call for reform as a neoliberal betrayal.

Avi Lewis's recent comments to CTV News about Canada Post perfectly encapsulate this tendency.

“We have shoved Canada Post so far into the market mindset,” Lewis declared, “that every few months we have a national conversation about why isn't Canada Post making money. Does the ambulance service make money? Do the police services make money? We're talking about a fundamental public service.”

Let us set aside, for a moment, that this comparison is obviously absurd. Police officers do not deliver Pizza Pizza flyers to your door. Ambulance drivers do not refuse service after three calls because they have "met their daily quota." The analogy collapses under the slightest weight because emergency services perform functions that are genuinely exclusive to the state.

Canada Post, by contrast, operates in a competitive marketplace alongside UPS, Puget, and Amazon's last-mile delivery network—a marketplace it entered willingly when it decided to pursue parcel revenue.

The deeper problem with Lewis's framing is that it conveniently ignores what Canada Post actually spends most of its time doing. I recently ordered merchandise that I paid extra for expedited shipping. It arrived one month later. In the meantime, my mailbox filled with the same unaddressed advertising flyers that constitute the bulk of Canada Post's daily output.

This is the “fundamental public service” we are supposedly defending: a legally protected monopoly on letter delivery, subsidized by the constitutional right to deliver glossy flyers for Canadian Tire. The union disputes only compound the confusion. Canada Post workers have, in recent years, refused to deliver political flyers during election periods—a position the Supreme Court rightly found violated Canadians' Charter right to hear from candidates.

So let us understand what is being defended here: a service that cannot reliably deliver paid-for parcels, that prioritizes advertising over civic communication, and whose labour disputes have actively interfered with democratic participation.

None of this means Canada Post must be profitable. Public services need not turn a profit. But they must be sustainable, and Canada Post is currently not that. Losses reached $748 million last year. The federal government will soon face a tough choice between restructuring, subsidizing, or redefining the mandate entirely. This is not a conversation driven by ideological market fundamentalism. It is a conversation driven by arithmetic.

If Lewis wants a proper analogy, he might want to consider public libraries. Libraries are universal services we fund without expecting profitability. But crucially, libraries do not fill their shelves with advertisements to pay the rent. They do not promise premium services they fail to deliver. And when a library system faces financial strain, we have an honest conversation about what level of service we are willing to fund.

That is the conversation we should be having about Canada Post. In most towns, door-to-door delivery could reasonably give way to communal mailboxes. The junk mail dependency requires scrutiny. The tension between universal service obligation and commercial ambition needs resolution.

But the new leader of the NDP does not want that conversation. He wants the warm feeling of declaring something a public service and ending the discussion there. He wants to equate a struggling postal system with paramedics rushing to save lives. This is not political analysis. It is political performance.

And it helps nobody—least of all Canada Post itself.