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You would think, then, that it would be a matter of some urgency to the post office’s political masters to somehow cajole it into doing the job we pay it to do. Yet whenever Canada Post comes in for one of its periodic public reviews, the focus is always the same: not, how can we improve mail service for Canadians, but how can we make life easier for Canada Post?

The latest report, from a panel headed by former broadcasting executive Françoise Bertrand, is no different. Thought it comes with the usual rah-rah about “transformational change” and “hard choices,” the options it presents amount to doing less, charging more or both. If Canada Post won’t deliver the mail, officialdom’s answer is that no one should get it — or that they should get it on alternate days, or should pay an extra annual home delivery fee, or should bloody well go and get it themselves.

Never having known any alternative to Canada Post — unable even to imagine an alternative — we are too prone to accept this logic. To be sure, Canada Post’s finances are in a dire state, notably its $8-billion pension deficit. Given the costs of restoring home delivery — another $1.2 billion annually, according to the panel — it sounds hard-headed and businesslike to say it has to go. Two-thirds of the country already uses community mailboxes; why shouldn’t the other third have to suffer the same fate?

But this has the issue back to front. The point is not to make the level of service contingent on Canada Post’s finances, nor is it the job of the post office’s customers to serve the needs of Canada Post. If Canada Post finds it too hard or tiresome or costly to deliver the mail, the only sensible response is to let someone else do it. Between the false alternatives of shutting down service or handing the keys to the treasury to the postal workers, there is a third: open the mail to competition, as many other countries have done.