Canada Post showing ‘early signs’ of financial recovery, CEO says

The head of Canada Post says it is showing “early signs” of financial recovery despite falling revenue and bigger losses in the first half of the year.

CEO Doug Ettinger says the postal service is winning back some of the parcel delivery market that has slipped away since 2019 as it continues with shipping discounts for small businesses and pushes a new online marketplace for them to sell products directly to consumers.

However, he says Canada Post remains “overbuilt” in cities and must be smaller in those urban areas in the future.

Switching the remaining four million addresses that still enjoy doorstep delivery to community mailboxes within about five years marks a key pillar of Canada Post’s plan to overhaul its business model in the face of declining letter mail and mounting financial losses.

Canada Post starts work to end most door-to-door mail delivery

The Crown corporation is launching an online tool Thursday that lets customers with door-to-door delivery enter their postal code to see when their area is slated for conversion to a community mailbox, with the first in more than 10 years completed a few days ago in Winnipeg and Sept-Îles, Que.

In August, Canada Post reported losses of $277-million before taxes for the second quarter of the year, marking an improvement from the $407-million in pretax losses a year earlier.