Government Operations Committee on June 18th, 2026

[Harb Gill, Conservative, Windsor West, ON]

I'm going to suggest, Mr. Ettinger, that 80 people are not enough for a country this size. They have an entire police service devoted to this in the U.S.

I'm going to leave the rest of my time to my colleague, Mr. Lawton. I look forward to the written answers from you, sir.

Thank you.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Gill.

I have a couple of quick questions on a topic I know you've addressed in the past.

The federal government at one point thought that Canada Post would be a logical conscript for its ill-fated firearms confiscation scheme. In the past, you and Canada Post have indicated, and your union has also indicated, that there is no interest in participating in this.

I just want to confirm with you if this is still your position.

[Doug Ettinger]

Yes, it's 100% still our position. Safety is our number one priority. We're not part of that program.

I, personally, was very uncomfortable with it at the time, in terms of their wanting folks to return their guns to post offices. I saw so many safety issues with that. We were not comfortable.

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

Further to that point, you're identifying areas where you hope to make up a deficit. The government hasn't been able to actually get any other mechanism that is viable for this through law enforcement or other groups. They could come to you and say, “Hey, we'll give you this much money conditionally to participate.”

Is that not at all something within the scope of what you're willing to do?

[Doug Ettinger]

Look, it's just me saying this openly, but one person's life is not something I want to live with. I think there just weren't enough safety guardrails around that particular proposal to make it viable.

We do ship on the ground from commercial manufacturers, but that's a very focused and very safe process where it's packaged in the right container and so on.

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

I've used it myself.

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

I'm familiar with that service as a customer. Thank you for that.

In the minute I have left, you indicated earlier that you wanted to speak to ways that you are looking at increasing the revenue stream. You have about 55 seconds if you'd like to share that now.

[Doug Ettinger]

There you go.

[Doug Ettinger]

Thank you.

As I said, the stability we have and the shackles coming off.... Our north star is to get to break-even in five years, so that's roughly 2030. What's good about our transformation with 10 work streams is that the team is extremely focused on this. We know what we have to do. We're ready. We have the teams in place.

By the way, we're not using consultants on this; we're doing it ourselves. It's on everyone's agenda. It's on my agenda every day. Every meeting we have is about transformation and how we are doing on the 10. We have a whole process to make sure they're integrated and not overlapping one another. That's been up and running for quite some time.

As we go forward, as I mentioned, there's a new retail platform for Canadian retailers. We want to grow the parcel business with all of this. For pricing—strategic pricing—it's not that we're going to discount like crazy, but we're going to go out there and try to retain customers, and for customers who left us during the labour disruption period, get them back with better service. Our service has never been better. Coming out of the last couple of years, it's 96% plus, coast to coast on a national basis.

There's pick up at home for returns. We have the most accessible return system in Canada. A lot of people are wanting to buy online and send things back. We have 25,000 locations where people can return things. You can go online, print a label with your retailer, slap the label on the package and bring it to Canada Post.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Mr. Ettinger.

[Doug Ettinger]

I'm getting into my marketing routine here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We're going to charge you for your advertising to offset some of our bills.

Mr. Danko, go ahead, please.

[John-Paul Danko, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I think my big take-away from this discussion today and from previous discussions we've had about Canada Post is that all parties agree on the importance of Canada Post to Canadians. I'm thinking about that in the current context of getting information to everyone in the country in a way that is trusted and that you know it is going to be delivered. If you think about it, with the challenges of local media advertising, advertising on social media or whatever platform it is, Canada Post is the only way. If there's something critical that you need to get out to every single Canadian and know it's going to get there by a trusted source, Canada Post is really the only option.

Thank you for sharing the transition plan and the importance of the service.

I want to use the time I have left to talk about the collective agreement with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. You touched on it a few times, but I want to give you the opportunity to talk about the importance of that to certainty and your plans moving forward.

[Doug Ettinger]

That's a great question.

If you noticed, I'm a little more positive today, and that's one of the main reasons. It's been tough on Canadians, tough on small business, tough on our employees and tough on everyone in this room. It was a long grind, and we're so very pleased that the members ratified the agreement. As I said earlier, it's not a perfect deal. No one gets a perfect deal. There's give and take. You make concessions. They make concessions. This is one of the first negotiated deals at the table in decades for us.

As I said before, most of our previous labour interactions went into arbitration where a judge decides, and they're great people but in a very narrow way. You don't get any change coming out of that, good or bad, for employees or for the company. This one will bring change.

An example is weekend delivery. We've been without that while the competition has been doing it. We think that weekend delivery will be as much as 25% of total volume over the next five to seven years. It's like 7%, 8% or 10% right now, but you have to have it. You have to have it in your portfolio. This is a five-year deal. Typically we had four-year deals, and this is five. It gives us more stability out to 2029.

This is what allows, at least potentially, customers to come back to us. It's not going to be easy. We're going to have to work hard to get their trust, and I can assure you that our sales team is out there working hard on that with all these new programs and all the things. It gives customers some confidence, especially small businesses. They were hurt more than anybody. We really want to partner with them, help them with pricing, help them with programs and how to set up their websites. There might be some advertising in our network. We're looking at a whole revenue stream around media. Think of post offices with an electronic screen advertising small businesses all across Canada, such as from Îles-de-la-Madeleine. You might have somebody doing some great things there, and they'll get exposure across Canada. We do a lot of that with small business.

We are unshackled and refreshed now. I can't say that enough. It's good for our employees, too. They have job security, but they know that transformation is coming. They understand what it's going to be, and we're going to work with them very carefully. These are good-paying jobs and, to the earlier point, they get great benefits, as they should, and great pensions. We need to maintain as many as we can. We'll do it, and we'll give them.... As I said earlier, as people retire and move on in their retirement with their pension and so on, we may not replace every position. That's where we're going to use attrition to get our numbers down. We're going to be very careful.

The team is so excited, I can't put it in words. The mountains that have been moved were felt to be immovable, to be honest with you, for years and decades really. We're ready to go. This is our moment.

[John-Paul Danko, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

That's great. I think that's a great place to leave this discussion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Madam Gaudreau will finish up, please.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I have one last question.

As I understand it, Mr. Ettinger, not only will workers be informed in advance of the changes affecting community mailboxes, among other things, but as of today, June 18, you have also promised to keep all Canadians and Quebeckers informed. You promised to set the record straight to reassure them and restore some lost trust in Canada Post.

Is that correct?

[Doug Ettinger]

One hundred per cent, I'm concerned that we've lost trust. We certainly lost trust through the last two years with our labour disruption, which was so difficult, but there's also this. We need to do right by Canadians. We need to give you that information.

By the way, our employees will be the first to know of any changes and, in fact, it's in the collective agreements. It's not only just something we would do, but they require a certain advance notice. We're not out there to purge everybody. It's going to be done thoughtfully. There will be some change that will have to happen for us to get this organization back to sustainability, but I promise you, the minute these additional programs are approved, we'll be out in the public talking about them and doing them properly.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We could make a list of all the questions asked.

We'll expect the answers in three weeks to make sure we don't forget any because there have been a lot of promises.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you for reminding our panel.

Thank you very much for being with us today.

I appreciate your optimism. If you watch me in committee, you know I'm not exactly the “glass is half full” guy. I'm the “glass is less than empty” person. However, I appreciate your optimism. If you're able to, I look forward to your providing some more information about some of the timing. We don't have an approved transformation plan, it seems. I don't want to say it's too optimistic to be optimistic when we don't have a plan yet, but I would appreciate it if, over the coming weeks and months, you could send us any information you can on some of a timeline. When we're burning through $1 billion in cash per year, I see a lot of urgency.

[Doug Ettinger]

There is urgency.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you for being with us.

Colleagues, before we break, I want to say thanks to our wonderful clerk, Marc-Olivier, the mighty MOG. Thank you also to Ryan and Olivier, as well as our translators, our support team and, of course, our IT team.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I will remind you that August 30 is the date we have set for witnesses for the motion 16 study. If you could have those in by then, I would appreciate it.

Mr. Ettinger, before you go, as I've stated before, I want to give a personal thank you to Donald Cooper. He is our Canada Post rep based in, unfortunately, Calgary, not Edmonton. He's always an incredible help. Recently, we ran into an issue where, unbeknownst to constituents, Canada Post or anyone else, the city decided to dig up several streets' worth of laneways, blocking their access. He was able to help get an emergency CMB put in so that we could get mail to our constituents right away. I want to pass that on to him and to you.

Thank you, again, for being with us.

[Doug Ettinger]

Thank you very much. I appreciate it very much.