By Howard Levitt

In striking, Canada Post workers are merely fighting against the inevitable

I recently wrote that working notice is the secret weapon for employers who want to escape the stranglehold of costly severance packages. Today, we see a parallel lesson unfolding on a national stage: Ottawa has finally stopped writing blank cheques for Canada Post.

And the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), furious at being dragged into the 21st century, has responded with its second nationwide strike of 55,000 of its members in less than a year.

This is no ordinary strike. It is an existential drama.

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Forty years ago, such a walkout would have brought the country to its knees. Cheques, bills, invoices — commerce itself — ground to a halt without mail. Canadians panicked. Governments caved.

This time? The country barely noticed. We clicked “send.”

That indifference is not just bad news for CUPW. It is a warning shot for the entire Canadian labour movement.

Canada Post has been hemorrhaging money for years — more than $5 billion in losses since 2018, with $1.5 billion more projected this year. The decline in letter mail is staggering: from 5.5 billion pieces twenty years ago to fewer than two billion today. At the same time, Canada Post’s once-dominant parcel business has collapsed to just 24 per cent of the market.

Minister Joël Lightbound finally did what governments had long avoided: admit that the model is broken. Home delivery is ending, rural post offices will close and planes will give way to trucks. CUPW calls this “an attack.” It is not an attack. It’s math.

By striking, CUPW is not fighting management. It is fighting inevitability. You can strike an employer. You cannot strike email. CUPW cannot picket Amazon.

And Canadians, unlike in the strikes of old, will not rally to the union’s side. They will barely notice.

A traveller walks past Air Canada flight attendants and supporters as they strike outside Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Dorval, Que., on Aug. 18.
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Every day or week of working notice reduces the employee’s wrongful dismissal entitlement by the same period of time, writes Howard Levitt.
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This strike is not just about Canada Post. It is a symbol of what is to come for many Canadian unions, that have for decades thrived by holding governments and employers hostage with the threat of disruption. But in a modern economy — digitized, diversified, decentralized — that leverage is fading.

Look at CUPW: a militant union once feared by Ottawa is now flailing against a government finally willing to call its bluff. If CUPW can be sidelined, any union can.

I wrote recently that Canada’s labour movement is heading for difficulty. This Canada Post strike shows that it is already there. CUPW may scream betrayal, but the truth is starker: their industry has outlived them.

What happens next will be telling. If Canada Post succeeds in forcing through these changes, it will embolden other employers to resist union demands, even in sectors where unions still wield clout.

The lesson will spread quickly: the era of paying ransom to militant unions is over. Now, instead of terrifying governments and employers, strikes merely remind us that some unions are still fighting the last war.

For Canadian labour in industries being eroded by technology, the message could not be clearer: adapt or die. CUPW chose the latter.

Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers with offices in Ontario and Alberta, and British Columbia. He practices employment law in eight provinces and is the author of six books, including the Law of Dismissal in Canada. Jeffrey Vandespyker is an associate at Levitt LLP.