First, they took away the trains. They did so by making passenger train service so slow and uncomfortable that, in the end, few complained when the rails were torn up.

Now they’re doing it to the post office.

The “they” in question refers to a series of national governments that, over time, have been dismantling institutions devised to hold this nation together.

Under the Liberals, passenger train service was slashed so that only a few intercity routes remained.

Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, the post office — an institution that predates Confederation — is being drawn and quartered.

With Ottawa’s blessing, the Crown corporation is jacking up stamp prices by 59 per cent and slashing services to a level unseen elsewhere in the developed world.

Charge more; offer less. It is a formula for commercial failure.

In a few years, the government of the day will be able to announce that it is winding up the remnants of the post office because, by then, almost no one will be using the service

Canada Post insists that its decision to eliminate door-to-door mail delivery within five years is a rational response to the rise of electronic communication. It is not.

First, it makes Canada an outlier. As post office spokesman Jon Hamilton confirmed this week, Canada will be the only major industrial country in the world without any door-to-door mail delivery.

Second, the decision does not, as government House leader Peter Van Loan claimed this week, affect just a few wealthy downtowners. Some 5 million households across the country currently receive door-to-door postal service.

These are people who live in towns, cities and suburbs built before the 1980s.

Yes, bankers in Rosedale will no longer get door-to-door service. But neither will welders in Etobicoke, pensioners in Welland or store clerks in London.

To say, as the government does, that two-thirds of Canadian households already lack door-to-door mail service is technically true. It is also misleading.

That two-thirds figure includes 3.8 million apartment and condo dwellers whose mail is delivered to their building lobbies, 739,000 rural residents with individual roadside mailboxes and about 1.8 million others — generally in hamlets and villages — who use general delivery or post office boxes.

An additional 3.9 million households rely on so-called group and community mailboxes. Situated out-of-doors, usually in newer suburbs, these face problems like theft and vandalism.

Canada Post admits it has no idea where it will find the space to put community mailboxes in densely populated towns and cities.

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Indeed, an air of crazed desperation surrounds the decision.

Until 2011, Canada Post was a money-maker. Like other national postal services, its letter business has been eroded by email. Like many other large companies, its ability to meet pension obligations has been hampered by rock-bottom interest rates.

But until this week, there was no sense that the corporation was contemplating suicide. It had just purchased a new fleet of minivans to modernize door-to-door delivery. Its employees, through their Canadian Union of Postal Workers had been floating their own suggestions, including resurrection of Canada’s long dormant postal savings bank system, to make the corporation more profitable.

Why the sudden resort to drastic measures? The politics around the pension issue give some hint.

This week, the government quietly announced that it will let Canada Post delay sorting out its pension troubles until 2018 — well after the next election. Without this dispensation, the government would have found itself on the hook for Canada Post’s $1 billion pension shortfall next year.

And that would have interfered with Harper’s plan to go to the polls in 2015 with a balanced budget.

So a solution was found: Delay the pension deadline and have Canada Post devise a scheme to cut costs by shedding up to 8,000 employees.

For the government, the benefit of the new arrangement is clear: A better chance at four more years of Harper.

For the rest of us, the cost is equally clear: the end of Canada’s postal service.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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