Evidence of meeting #22 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was plan.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Financial Officer, Canada Post Corporation
There are no restrictions in the MOU pertaining to that particular subject, no.
Chief Financial Officer, Canada Post Corporation
It's really around ensuring that we can maintain operation and service to Canadians.
Conservative
Tamara Jansen Conservative Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Again, thank you.
I want to come back to the people who really feel the consequences of the problem that we're facing here.
When mail slows down or stops, rural Canadians are hit the hardest. Many rely on prescription deliveries, government documents, benefit cheques and essential goods that simply cannot be accessed any other way. In some communities, the post office isn't just a building. It's like the centre of life, and it's where seniors stay connected, small businesses ship their products, and families keep traditions alive through birthday cards and Christmas presents. I'm left wondering how we let it get this far.
I mean, the warnings were not subtle. The Kaplan report laid out exactly why keeping Canada Post afloat without structural changes would be nearly impossible, yet the Liberal government shackled you until the corporation was effectively insolvent. Now you've had $5.5 billion in losses. How have you been financing that? Did you have it in the kitty, or who are you borrowing that from?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Well, we had a surplus that we were running with, so that helped quite a bit, but I'll come back to the Kaplan report.
The Kaplan report was a public hearing. I thought the recommendations from it were very clear and very strong, and we're pleased that the government has picked up on those recommendations and endorsed them going forward. We're ready to act on those, assuming that the plan gets approved.
Conservative
Tamara Jansen Conservative Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
You said that you were working with a surplus. Was the $5.5 billion covered by the surplus completely?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
No, no. That's—
Conservative
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
I don't recall, but....
Go ahead.
Chief Financial Officer, Canada Post Corporation
What Doug was referring to is the healthy cash liquidity balance that we had on our balance sheet. At one point, we were a bit over $2 billion in that particular account, which we used to fund and supplement the operating losses over the years.
Conservative
Chief Financial Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Up until mid-2025, we were using our cash reserves. The repayment of the $500 million in bonds that was due in July 2025 was the first trigger that we would be really, I want to say, “running out of cash”, and those were the discussions coming out of the Kaplan report that we had with the government to ensure that we secured the $1 billion for us to continue. Up until July 2025, we were using our cash reserves to fund the operating losses that we had.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thanks very much.
Now we'll go to Mr. Gasparro, and then we'll finish up with Madame Gaudreau.
Liberal
Vince Gasparro Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Thank you for being here, and thank you for your service.
I want to pick up on something that was mentioned earlier in terms of addressing seniors. In my riding of Eglinton—Lawrence, we have quite a few seniors' centres. In many of them, English or French is not the seniors' first language, and this concern may actually be relevant in other parts of the country.
How will you be communicating some of these changes more broadly to folks whose first language isn't English or French? That's question one.
Second, how will you try to address some of their concerns? How will the communication flow go back and forth with some of these individuals, particularly seniors, in this case?
December 11th, 2025 / 4:55 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
That's a great question.
We'll have a full communications program, as I touched on earlier. We're going to do a strong job of promoting it—how to access it and how to apply. It's easy, but we know we have to be thoughtful about how we do that. We'll make sure that we promote it, so that everyone knows how to access the program, whether it's online or whether we have to do something by mail or whatnot.
In terms of other languages, we'll be more than happy to look at whatever languages are required. We've done that in other situations with money transfer programs through our post offices. We do them in many languages. We, of course, have that capability. Whatever the needs are, we will make sure that it gets done, and we'll do it properly. There will be no limitation on how we communicate that to Canadians.
Liberal
Vince Gasparro Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
I'm making the assumption that you'll take a data-based approach. You'll look at the census data, and you'll look at the different languages on a constituency basis—obviously both official languages, plus.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Yes, absolutely, we will. We'll look at that, and we have, again, some experience with that in other programs. We'll make sure we cover all those languages. We understand that this can be uncomfortable for people, so we'll make sure they have service in the language that they're most comfortable with.
Liberal
Vince Gasparro Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
That's great.
Here's a basic question for you. What do you think Canada Post's role is in the 21st century?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Again, it's back to a digital post office. Many of the things we're doing now behind the scenes are digital. Every day, we're looking at new ways to make it easier to buy something on your phone and track it on your phone and find out when it's being delivered.
We have a service that we haven't promoted much yet. It's called MyMail. If a parcel lands in your community mailbox, it can send you a notification to let you know that it's there and what it is. You have to go on the Canada Post app to get access to it, and we have millions of Canadians on that. We are working on things like that constantly.
As for the future, e-commerce has a very promising growth future, as I said. It will be doubling over the next 10 years, so the pie is going to get bigger. The competition is also very strong; they're some of the best companies in the world, so it won't be easy, but we're going to work hard to earn back the trust of our consumers and our customers, and we believe we now have the tools to do that.
We see a digital future, but we have to get our core business in line first. We have to get our house in order with all the things we've been talking about, now that the government has taken them seriously and has said that they're going to take those legacy regulations and policies away. That will enable us to be a much more efficient operation going forward.
Bloc
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Mr. Ettinger, not a week has gone by since September when someone hasn't messaged or called me about this. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I'm on the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates or the fact that I'm the critic. Seriously, most of the calls are from people with concerns about the Purolator lockers in post offices. Other issues people raise are the cuts, ties to the board of directors, the appearance of impropriety, influential external members and outsize compensation.
As far as the work environment goes, that worries me. I'd like to know what I should say to employees, because change always goes down better in bite-sized pieces. Nobody likes change, but it's necessary. It was necessary a long time ago. What do I tell them? They are very worried.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Post Corporation
Thank you. There are lot of questions packed into that one.
As soon as we can share the plan, we will go to our employees immediately. We have town halls constantly with employees, and we'll make sure that our frontline supervisors are communicating to our employees and our unions, of course. We'll be collaborating with our union on anything to do with people changes, to make sure that we're all aligned on those changes. We look forward to that.
Again, the approach on this is that we're committed to service enhancements. It's not about cutting, although there's no doubt that we're going to look different going forward, and we have to, but we're looking to be thoughtful, respectful and flexible, and we're going to listen to the municipalities, the towns, the villages. We're going to listen to them and be flexible in terms of what they need.
Really, what we're trying to create here is a Canada Post for the future, one that has better service and the support of the business community in Canada, small business in particular. There's the great example of Shopify. They started out very small years ago. Canada Post was there to support them, and they've done so well across the world. We need more Shopifys in Canada, and small business will be where that comes from. We're going to do even more in terms of our relationships with small business going forward. That's a big priority.
