SAINTS PRESERVE US
Take This Job, Please
A recent issue of The Economist featured a four-page spread headlined Executive
Focus. Though essentially career opportunities most of us are unqualified to
pursue, I was nonetheless intrigued.
I turned the page to face a double-truck,
black-only, bilingual ad seeking a new president and chief executive officer
for Canada Post and its trio of subsidiaries. Lately I’ve been re-fighting the
Second World War on YouTube, watching ancient episodes of Garrison’s Gorillas, The Rat
Patrol and Combat!. Each series
boasts a similar scene: some poor, perspiring bastard on his hands and knees
poking at the dirt in a minefield with the tip of his bayonet. This is the job
the Government of Canada hopes someone other than me will apply for, in confidence.
Times have changed since the Upper and Lower Canadas confederated in 1867. Canadian Crown
corporations sport spotty histories. For the most part, these bastards of a
mixed economy were created to supply essential services that the private sector
was incapable, unwilling or distrusted to provide. In theory Crown corporations
are models of enlightened capitalism in that profit is not their main goal but
nor is draining the national treasury and so breaking even each fiscal year is
the middling, sensible bar set for these entities.
Every Canadian taxpayer is a stakeholder in
every Canadian Crown corporation. Every Canadian should derive some incremental
benefit from the existence of any government administered business. The hitch
is that Crown corporations are government businesses. They are subject to the
philosophy, will and whims of the ruling party in Ottawa ; long-term vision might last for three
years or less because there’s always an election on the horizon. Senior
executive positions, patronage plums, used to be doled out to committee room
fixers, bagmen, party acolytes deemed too greasy for more prestigious Senate
appointments. All a bit like the CIA these days: not much experience necessary.
Canada Post is a venerable 19th
century institution attempting to cope in the 21st. Besides,
telegraphs and telegrams were never a threat. Nor was Bell Telephone: people
kept writing letters because long distance was so expensive. Cell phones were
expensive toys for busy salesmen. Electronic mail was destined to remain an
internal corporate communications tool. The disastrous parallel is Kodak
blindly convinced that people would always require its film for their cameras
(and high school drug dealers its canisters).
Faced with a rapidly declining volume of
letter mail, unwieldy labour contracts and fearsome pension obligations, Canada
Post finally began to pivot. The proposal that irked Canadians coast to coast
to coast was the cessation of home delivery in favour of community mailboxes.
Fewer carriers, inexpensive part-timers, could cover more walks. This was not a
radical innovation. The method had already been implemented in apartment
buildings, condominium developments and new suburban sub-divisions. Canada ’s
population is getting old; a goodly portion of us remember when the postman
always rang twice and turned up again on Saturdays. And by God, we fought for
the ongoing household delivery of nothing rather than walking a block for no
reason.
We’re fortunate at the Crooked 9. By some
quirk of fate we still have home delivery. However, our regular carrier has not
been striding her route for a week now. I hope she’s on holiday and not been
rotated to another neighbourhood in the city. Her substitute is some kid who
wears a black flu mask – probably over his eyes because any mail we’ve received
recently needs to be redirected to our neighbours. Maybe he could get work with
the CIA, they’ll hire anybody, although dead letter drops might be tricky.
Canada Post’s venture into the digital
world has met with middling results. Essentially the Crown Corporation was
years late and an algorithm short. The other two pillars of continuing
viability present an interesting juxtaposition. Direct mail, addressed or
unaddressed, junk to you, works, does its job for marketers. Quaint though
still remarkably effective, flyers, pamphlets and postcards draw consumers to
sellers in their towns.
Cannily, Canada Post plays both sides of
the country’s diminishing main streets. Revenue comes in e-commerce cartons,
parcel delivery. Here, ironically, Canada Post competes against itself because
Purolator, its courier subsidiary, does the exact same thing. A logistics
analyst might describe the situation as a dual delivery stream. All I see are
conflicting brands, and redundancies of services, jobs, fleets and facilities.
A formal unification of the co-habiting cannibals only makes sense.
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