Call defence a service if you want. The point is that it doesn’t vary with supply and demand. The government decides how much it wants to spend on defence and that’s the budget.

Mail is different. If everyone sent 10x as much mail as we do now there wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we live in. Mail is in steep decline from 5.5 billion letters 2 decades ago to 2 billion today and dropping. Most of that mail is sent by businesses who are increasingly looking for ways to further cut it back.

The company I work for spends millions of dollars a year sending out mail, much of it to customers who have opted out of receiving mail but get it anyway because of legacy databases and slow-moving business decisions. The postal strike has a lot of managers now prioritizing the rectification of that issue. We’re going to see a huge drop in outgoing mail volumes and that will directly hit Canada Post’s bottom line.