Canada Post CEO touts ‘early signs’ of recovery even as financial woes persist

Canada Post has begun to show “early signs” of financial recovery, its CEO says, as the beleaguered Crown corporation starts to step back from the fiscal cliff.

At its annual public meeting, Doug Ettinger said Canada Post is winning back some of the parcel delivery market that has slipped away since 2019. To make those gains, the Crown corporation is giving shipping discounts to small businesses and pushing a new direct-to-consumer online marketplace.

“I am extremely confident that the organization is not only trending in the right direction, it is poised to re-establish itself as a crucial infrastructure built to serve Canada,” Ettinger said, invoking national sovereignty to make the case for a healthy postal service.

However, its network of post offices remains “overbuilt” in cities and must be scaled down, he said Thursday.

Ettinger qualified that Canada Post will continue to serve rural and remote communities. “We will not abandon the small communities that rely on us.”

Switching the remaining four million addresses that still enjoy doorstep delivery to community mailboxes within about five years marks a key pillar of Canada Post’s plan to overhaul its business model in the face of declining letter mail and financial losses.

The Crown corporation launched an online tool Thursday that lets customers with door-to-door delivery enter their postal code to see when their area is slated for conversion to a community mailbox. The first such switch in more than 10 years was completed a few days ago in Winnipeg and Sept-Îles, Que., executives said.

By the end of 2027, about 700,000 more households from Halifax to Victoria will be collecting their mail from the compact aluminum boxes, according to Canada Post.

In August, the organization reported losses of $277 million before taxes for the second quarter of the year, marking an improvement from $407 million pre-tax loss a year earlier.

The three-month period revealed “signs of an early turning point,” said chief financial officer Rindala El-Hage, as revenue rose — from parcels in particular — and operating costs plummeted.

“These results do not resolve our structural challenges, but they show that … the trajectory can improve,” she said.

Ettinger twice referred to the “fiscal cliff” the service still faces and pointed the finger at successive governments for a sluggish response. “This is not where any of us wanted to be,” said the chief executive.

But Ettinger, who is slated to step down at the end of his second term in March, said the current government under Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened the door to overdue shifts, such as lifting the moratorium on new community mailboxes imposed by his predecessor in 2015.

Other reforms include weekend parcel delivery — under a staggered rollout across the country that kicked off this month — and expected post office closures.

To win over small businesses, they will continue to receive Canada Post’s biggest shipping discounts no matter how small the volume through the end of the year. A 15 per cent discount on fuel surcharges for domestic parcels eases the pain of price hikes tied to the soaring price of gas and diesel.

A new online marketplace dubbed Canada Shops is also in the testing phase. Launched over the summer, it aims to connect Canadian retailers with domestic shoppers.

Between 2019 and 2023, the postal service’s share of the parcel market plummeted to 29 per cent from 62 per cent, as Amazon and other competitors seized on skyrocketing demand for next-day deliveries.

“This isn’t about competing with other marketplace giants,” said chief marketing officer Rod Hart of the direct-to-consumer platform.

The update from Canada Post comes less than five months after postal workers approved a tentative agreement that will boost their wages nearly 10 per cent in the first 24 months of the five-year deal.

The green light given by most of the union’s 55,000 employees followed more than two years of labour strife. Greater use of community mailboxes, which reduce the need for letter carriers, was among the sticking points.

In December 2024, the federal government asked the Canada Industrial Relations Board to step in to quash a month-long strike, and struck an Industrial Inquiry Commission to find a path forward. That probe, led by William Kaplan, made a series of recommendations that were later adopted and rolled out in a suite of sweeping changes to Canada Post’s mandate.

Announced in September 2025, the overhaul lifted the community mailbox moratorium and ended the freeze on rural post office closures — some locations are now surrounded by suburban subdivisions — that had been in place since 1994, covering close to 4,000 outlets.