Right in the centre - A lot to be learned

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Published on Friday, June 6, 2025

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

I think there’s a lot that could be learned from rural businesses. Just thinking back to some columns I have written recently about bad phone answering systems at some businesses and an over dependence on computer records, I become grateful for local businesses that do customer service correctly. Most rural businesses treat their customers very well. That’s in stark contrast to bigger corporate outfits who make phone-in customers have to press multiple buttons in a desperate search for service or answers.

In our business and travels, we or our staff enter over 200 doors every week delivering one or more of our three family-owned community newspapers. We are well met at every one of the places we go.

When it comes to local business services, when we call an electrician or a plumber, they come promptly.

Our vehicle servicing is done as soon as the overloaded garages can get us in the door.

Our grocery stores, pharmacies and furniture stores are always helpful.

The common thread is local and community. Every town and village should cling to and support their local services. Rural Manitoba is strewn with communities that used to offer services but do so no more, our roads are dotted with sad memories of how things used to be.

Rural Canada in general and rural Manitoba in particular is on the verge of another great shift in services. I speak of Canada Post. Here’s the background as I understand it. Every town and village used to have a Post Office. Instead many now have community lockboxes and I suspect many more will have them in the future. It’s hard to pin blame for the demise of Canada Post but there’s plenty to go around.

Many of our younger people will have no memory of when mail order shopping was a big deal, lead by Eatons, Sears and many other companies that shipped goods to rural customers.

Today, internet shopping has replaced the mail orders but Canada Post still delivers a lot of those parcels. Unfortunately for Canada Post, the courier companies are beating them to the punch. 

Canada Post is into a threatened strike again in less than six months. The problem is that neither the postal workers nor Canada Post are willing to face the reality that change has to come. Canada Post may lose $1 billion this year. That’s 1,000 million dollars. That isn’t good and it isn’t sustainable without huge inputs of tax dollars. The union is fighting change as much as the PO itself.

Here’s a few examples. Why is door-to-door delivery five days a week still a thing? It makes no sense.

Why are there rural routes? Most people can come to a Post Office or a lock box once or twice a week.

How about wage demands? I am willing to bet that if Canada Post held a job fair offering prospective mail carrier jobs at even the current rate, there would be many applicants. That may mean that postal workers are well paid already.

Internally, CP and the union insist on some stupid rules. Post Offices are supposed to bag up ALL incoming mail and ship it to a regional sorting centre. That means mail coming into a local post office, destined for a PO box in that same Post Office, has to be delivered to a regional centre, sorted and sent back to the post office it was delivered from and then placed in the customer’s PO box. That’s a make work project if ever there was one. 

Many people within and outside the system complain that Canada Post has way too many administrators, bureaucrats and vice-presidents. I think I agree.

I am very concerned that the federal government will step in and prop up an out-dated Post Office system with a $billion or more every year and nothing will change. If Canada Post really wants to change and survive, then the powers that be better get in a car and visit a bunch of local post offices to figure out how to survive. The local Postmasters, Postmistresses and staff know what’s needed but I don’t believe they have ever been asked. Based on past Post Office and federal government performance, I doubt that they ever will be asked.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the newspaper staff.