Yes, it is more expensive to deliver an average letter or parcel in Canada than it is in Germany. Even for locations that are accessible by road, the average fuel cost is much higher. (We won’t even talk about what it takes to get a letter to, say, Iqaluit, or anywhere else that’s only accessible by air for part or all of the year.)

Raising the price of sending postal mail disproportionately affects people in remote areas who have no alternative, because courier services won’t go there. Many of those people are Indigenous, which opens a whole can of political worms. Most of them are also poor, making it difficult for them to afford the raised prices. Result: Lawsuits. Lots and lots of lawsuits.

Did you really just ask that question? Did you even think before pressing send?

How do you get your license? Health card? In Ontario, both are mailed. You renew approximately every 5 years.

“My experience is the only relevant one! No one else could possibly be any different from what I’ve personally experienced!”

That’s what you are saying. That’s how dumb that sounds.

Just because you only get ads, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a basic need for a lot of people.

If it were up to Volvo socialists, we would still be employing whalers and candle makers.

What’s important is that there is some form of public service communication that everyone can access. The mail is safe to deprecate if and only if internet access is a public service instead: if every person gets a computer or smartphone with an internet connection for free.

That would honestly be a great system, but that’s not one Canadians have. So the post should stay.

You are only viewing this as a business. Not a public service. Private delivery companies can refuse to deliver for any reason. Now, let’s take this into the context of sensitive parcels or mail-in voting. How do you know for sure that this future version of delivery will deliver it in good faith when it is in the hands of private control? Laws, rules and legislation be damned even if they exist for when there are high stakes things involved we know there is risk of cheating (like elections). Why would you even want to invite such a risk? We also know that the government are incredibly bad at keeping public data secure - so I wouldn’t count on a fully electronic voting system.

Look at what electronic payment providers (Visa and Mastercard) have done to artists and indie developers. They are being deplatformed simply because under the eyes of these payment processors, they do not fit their broad and obscure guidelines, when the hosting platform (Steam and Patreon for example) and laws itself allows for such content. Under a neutral payment processor this wouldn’t have happened. People’s lives and income streams would collapse overnight.

Now look at media companies, are you also suggesting that CBC should be sold off and privatized when it’s obvious that every private media company out there is out to push their version of propaganda and bias? Last I checked CBC doesn’t make money either.

Using modern technology to fill in much of the services, while viable, is simply not a complete solution and it invites more risk than necessary.

The cost for sending parcels domestically is relatively cheap only because we are collectively subsidizing it - which in turn every Canadian actually benefits from this. This anchors the prices of parcel delivery among the private ones to stay relatively close to Canada Post’s prices. You, in fact, benefit from this. Canada’s population simply cannot be compared to many other country’s postal rates because we do not have the population density for cheaper rates. What makes it worse is that Canada Post doesn’t have the right of first refusal for any kind of mail or parcel delivery.

Your frustration with Canada Post should be directed at the series of federal governments that even let this happen in the first place when Canada Post itself have been telling the feds that they need to change their mandate for it to be more solvent.

Maybe you should also look into the cost of operating public transit, why Canada doesn’t have a robust passenger rail network, and the duopoly of Air Canada and WestJet.

Great, do the readings then, it’ll clear that up for you.

cost is a perfectly valid reason.

yes, public services don’t need to generate profits, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for public services to squander public finances.

home mail delivery for everyone adds very little extra value for a lot of extra cost.

You are living in the consequences of the politics that sought reform over change. I don’t feel as confident continuing that course of action as many of you seem to.

Normally, people arrive at what you’ve just said when they don’t fully understand the gravity of these things relative to the time and resources we have to actually build something better.

That’s just how liberalism has always functioned. It is fundamentally a settler-colonial set of politics that seeks to objectify human action as commodity; any claim to social justice is a result of forced concessions and long-term appropriation tactics. Neoliberals do not pretend to be progressive, they use language that they know will appeal to liberals who are too illiterate to understand their own bigoted internalized values. Conservatives (the PC party as well as conservatism in the twenty-first century) are not fundamentally opposed to liberalism’s basis of hierarchal material wealth and capitalist economics, they mostly differ in the audiences they target.

Fascism and liberalism are also not fundamentally opposed by any means, and fascism is more accurately described as a liberal tool than anything else since one is far more durable than the other. It is a philosophy that depends on the subordination of other groups to exist and the creation of an arbitrary privileged group to benefit from that subordination (such as how poor white men will confuse their racial and gender identity as a level of solidarity with wealthy white men and how whiteness can shift depending on how it benefits the maintenance of this hierarchy). Liberalism emerged out of white-supremacist, patriarchal settler-colonial states and very much still operates under the imperatives created by that social order, which is where fascists get their notions of race and gender from and why their criticisms of liberalism are more often oriented around its failure to effectively benefit naturalized privileged groups like men and white men especially. It’s more difficult to explain how these ideologies are different and yet cooperate in a nearly identical way as seen in Germany, Italy, and Spain during the early- to mid-twentieth century than it is to identify their common material interests and motivations.