Government Operations Committee on June 18th, 2026

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay.

What is the largest single expenditure remaining under net zero? Is it pretty much everything?

[Rindala El-Hage]

The largest expenditure would be the buildings and the fleet, for sure.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Your report estimates decarbonization potentially saving up to $85 million annually long term. Have those projections been independently validated?

[Rindala El-Hage]

I can get back to you on that, but yes, absolutely, we do have a team that validates that.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

How many years would it take for the projected savings to recover the estimated $1-billion investment?

[Rindala El-Hage]

From memory, that's within the 10-year view that we have. That envelope that you're talking about is a 10-year view.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Okay.

At the same time that the board approved net zero, was Canada Post already warning about its long-term financial sustainability?

[Rindala El-Hage]

At that point in time, we knew that we had some of the historic challenges and constraints that we had to work on, but we weren't in the situation that we are today.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Did the minister responsible for Canada Post review and approve those transition plans while you knew that you were already struggling?

[Rindala El-Hage]

We have been working over the past year with our minister's office to discuss and identify how we proceed with that—

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

So Minister Lightbound has been red-flagged.

[Rindala El-Hage]

They're very well aware of the situation, and we are in contact with them to decide how we're going to approach it.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Did the minister ever direct Canada Post to delay, scale back or reconsider the transition because of your financial situation?

[Rindala El-Hage]

At this point in time, there has been no specific directive, but due to the market availability of EVs and how ready it is, we've paused it.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Did anyone in the government question whether a $1-billion climate transition should proceed while Canada Post was posting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses?

[Rindala El-Hage]

We are in active discussion with the government to show them what those investments are and what the GHG savings and emissions reduction will be. They're very well aware of that. As we focus on building our future corporate plans, those will be built in the required investment with the alignment of the government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Before we go to Mr. Gasparro, I'll remind you that we passed a motion in this committee that, if any questions are put to you, we require an answer within 21 days.

Mr. Gasparro, go ahead, please, for five minutes.

[Vince Gasparro, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for your service.

According to the 2024 Canada Post annual report, in 2006 you were delivering five and a half billion letters annually, and that number has since dropped to two billion. That same report said, “A postal system built for 5.5 billion letters can't survive on two billion letters.”

You've talked a lot about your modernization plan and engagement with small businesses, which is great.

Can you drill down a little bit more on how you plan to reverse the losses from 2025? Drill down a little more for me. Talk about small businesses, parcel delivery, etc.

[Doug Ettinger]

I'll say a couple of things very quickly. I'll try to be as expedient as I can.

Now that we have the legacy restrictions removed, we're unfrozen from the 1990s. We have a lot more flexibility going forward. The first negotiated deal in decades was done with our major union, so weekend delivery and all these new programs that I talked about earlier will be unleashed.

Part of the problem in the last 20 years has been that a lot of our labour disputes went to arbitration. Arbitration is a very narrow approach, and you don't get the change you need. Between those changes from last September and the new, important five-year deal with CUPW, we now have the flexibility to bring change. That's a big part of the turnaround.

We've also made some strategic investments in capacity and in IT that will enable us to come out very strongly. We're in a hyper-competitive environment against some of the best companies in the world. We have IT analytics and pricing analytics now that we can use so that we're very strategic on that. We're getting some of the best results for delivery on time in our history with a relatively new facility in Scarborough. The transformation plan we have is very thorough around all of that. As I said earlier, CMBs alone will save us $400 million to $500 million a year.

The main thing is to make sure, with customers, consumers and small businesses, that we are doing a better job with them on a customer service basis so they want to use us going forward. That's why a lot of these new programs have been developed. They're in the pipeline, and we're going to launch them over the next several months. The all-Canadian retail platform online will be a friendly platform for business and so on. There's a lot of it that we can now move forward on that the team is extremely excited about. We're ready for it. I think this is our moment to seize the opportunity, do it thoughtfully, do it respectfully, but move forward with with all these changes that we've been waiting for for a long time.

[Vince Gasparro, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

I'd like to focus a little more on parcels versus mail. Have you looked at international best practices in other jurisdictions? I'm thinking of Australia, the U.K. and parts of Europe. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Doug Ettinger]

Yes, thank you.

I'm on a global committee called KPG, representing 11 countries around the world. We meet constantly, virtually, and we exchange best practices. I'm very close to the CEO of Australia Post, La Poste in France, and so on. We compare notes.

On a global basis, we're all facing the same challenges. It's just that there are some differences in terms of timing and emphasis. We joke with Australia that we have snow and they have sand but that otherwise we're pretty similar. They also have a really low population density, actually lower than ours. They're the only country in the world with a population density lower than ours. They're at three people per kilometre, and we're at four per kilometre.

Our emphasis is certainly on parcels. All of our programs around small business are on parcels. The pricing programs that we're looking at are about making parcels affordable for small business. The retail marketplace that I talked about is about parcels, with Canadian retail companies supplying Canadian consumers who are looking for their goods, and on and on. Pickup at home is about parcel pickup.

I know that some people don't like the CMBs, but they're very secure. They're dry. They're locked up. They reduce injuries. They're good for the environment at the same time. Most importantly, they're a parcel locker now. They're not just for letters. They were originally built 40 years ago for letters. A lot of our programs were built in the 1980s and 1990s around letter mail, but they fit 80% of the parcels that go through our system.

Now we have MyMail. If you get the Canada Post app—I'd expect all of you to be on the Canada Post app, by the way, as a little plug for the team—it will give you a notification when you have a parcel and who it's from. All of these are things we want to move forward on, and we haven't been able to do so for quite some time.

[Vince Gasparro, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you.

Mr. Lawton, welcome to OGGO.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's good to be here on this committee for the first time.

Also, thank you, Mr. Ettinger and team, for being here.

Just to confirm that we're operating from the same baseline here, Canada Post lost $1.57 billion last year and $205 million in the first quarter of this year. Are those numbers correct?

[Doug Ettinger]

Yes, they are.