The mail is moving again, but the labour dispute at Canada Post raises questions about how the service can find its footing in a world dominated by email.

Rural and remote communities are dependent on Canada Post for everything from medicine to food.

But many Canadians say they didn’t miss their bills or junk mail.

Others learned to adapt. Small- and medium-sized businesses, dependent on the postal service for invoices, payments and shipping, found alternatives after the June 14 lockout, from scanning invoices to electronic payments, to choosing couriers.

Dan Kelly of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business says while many will need Canada Post for deliveries, since it is mandated to deliver to every address in the country, others have switched to electronic invoicing and probably will stick with it.

“The bad news for the union and Canada Post is they have hastened a negative trend for themselves,” Kelly said.

Canada Post spokeswoman Anick Losier understands that reality.

“We are extremely worried that people have found alternatives,” she said. “The digital age is here and we need to make changes instead of relying on a product in decline.”

Canada Post already offers police background checks and PIN management for American Express.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers thinks Canada Post needs to come up with new services such as banking, especially in far-flung places where the post office is the only business in town.

“While Canada has simply talked about postal banking, most of the rest of the world has been doing it,” said a 2010 union report submitted to Canada Post. “Each year, 1.5 billion people use the services of postal banks and more than 400 million have postal bank accounts.”

Or the post office could offer Internet service in remote or rural locations or provide services for federal and provincial governments.

Others say privatization is the answer, including Harvey Schwartz, an emeritus professor of economics at York University.

“If you look at what’s happened to Canada Post, it’s a miracle that it’s still around today,” he said. “It’s barely profitable.”

Canada Post hasn’t been subsidized by the taxpayer in years, and it has turned a profit for 15 years straight. According to its 2009 annual report, the most recent one available, profit was $319 million before taxes. Adjusting for unplanned pension and benefit costs, pre-tax profit would have been $48 million.

That’s better than the United States Postal Service, which announced last week it is suspending pension contributions to its employees’ pension fund.

The move is an effort to conserve cash as the U. S. post office continues to lose money. It was $8 billion U.S. in the red last year, and it faces the possibility of running out of cash by the end of the fiscal year in September.

But letter mail has been in a steady decline in Canada, falling to 5.08 billion in 2009 from 5.45 billion in 2005. Canada Post says letter volumes have declined 17 per cent per address over the last five years, yet 200,000 addresses are added each year.

That means revenues per address are down, because each household or business is receiving or mailing fewer letters.

Canada Post insists it must cut labour costs to compete. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers wouldn’t agree to lower wages and pensions to the next generation of employees.

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Back-to-work legislation has put that final decision in the hands of an arbitrator, though it set out wages for current employees, less than Canada Post’s last offer.

Schwartz points out some European countries have privatized their post offices. All 27 member nations of the European Union have agreed to allow competition.

In Germany, Deutsche Bundespost was privatized and it eventually became Deutsche Post DHL, delivering letter and parcels across Germany. It has about 470,000 employees worldwide and generated revenues of 51 billion euros in 2010.

Deutsche Post’s website touts innovative products from helping businesses create publications for direct mail campaigns to its E-Postbrief, where individuals and businesses can exchange legally binding and confidential documents electronically.

It also focuses on the consumer, letting people buy a stamp online, where people can print it out at home, or through a secure cellphone transaction.

Opher Baron, a professor of operations management at the Rotman School of Management, says privatization permits organizations to move into new areas, especially to find ways to make money.

“You don’t want a government organization to move into a profit-making organization,” Baron said, adding Canada Post and the United States Postal Service must to focus on how to add value to their services.

“Canada Post has a wonderful way of getting to the end customers. They do it effectively with shipping, sorting, they know how to get a small package to me,” he said.

“But on its own, it doesn’t give enough value, because people don’t know who I am,” said Baron, adding the postal service could use its knowledge for more direct marketing, recording what types of parcels customers get. “You need to know who the end customer is.”

Baron, who lives in a subdivision in Thornhill, doesn’t get delivery to his door. Like 24 per cent of Canadians, he goes to a cluster of postal boxes on the corner to collect his mail, but he confesses he doesn’t go daily.

“The urgency of mail was I might get a bill or I might get some information that is important to me. These days, most of what I get is junk mail,” he said.

But over time, the post office will adapt. “Fifty years from today, I can hardly see the post office as it is — sending tons of mail to anyone. It won’t have added value and it won’t be economical,” he said.

“They might scale back their services. You might get mail every couple of weeks.”

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