OPINION: Privatizing Canada Post will end an archaic boondoggle

Given its near monopoly over large segment of postal market, Canada Postal has few incentives to keep costs down or be profitable

Published May 01, 2026  •  2 minute read

Canada Post mailboxes are seen in Ottawa on Dec. 13, 2024. Photo by TONY CALDWELL /Postmedia Network

According to a recent announcement by Canada Post, it lost $1.57 billion in 2025 — the “largest loss before tax” in the Crown corporation’s history. Clearly, privatization is the only viable path forward.

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Canada Post’s huge financial loss last year follows nearly a decade of red ink. The organization has lost more than $5 billion since 2018 and had to borrow more than $1 billion (a huge sum of taxpayer money) from Ottawa in both 2025 and 2026 to stay afloat.

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Because Canada Post is a Crown corporation, it operates at the behest of the federal government and has a near monopoly in the postal market. Canadians have no other options if they’re dissatisfied with prices, service quality or delivery times for letter mail.

Canada Post has struggled to modernize its operations and deliveries and faced several labour disputes with unionized workers. Labour uncertainty and lack of innovation have led to increasing costs, waning revenues and ever-rising borrowing.

Of course, all of this was predictable.

Few incentives to keep costs down

Given Canada Post’s near monopoly over a large segment of the postal market, it has few incentives to keep costs down or be profitable because the government (i.e. taxpayers) is there to bail it out. The Canada Post Corporation Act prevents other potential service providers from entering the letter-delivery market and the subsequent limited competition means the Crown corporation has little reason to innovate or improve services for customers. And Canadians are left with a failing business and a financial albatross, indifferent to customer needs.

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While Canada Post has begun to adopt what it calls “transformative measures,” such as ending door-to-door home deliveries to reduce costs, small tweaks will not solve the underlying problems with the business model.

There’s frankly no good reason why Canada Post should remain a Crown corporation. Private companies such as Amazon, UPS and FedEx already deliver the majority of parcels from coast to coast. They compete for customers based on price, service quality and delivery times. If they don’t do a good job meeting consumer needs or consistently lose money, they’ll go out of business. Government entities in the postal market are not needed, nor have they proven to be financially viable. The federal government should finally privatize Canada Post and end its stranglehold over letter mail.

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European countries, including the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, privatized their postal services roughly two decades ago. Prices fell by more than 10% in each of those countries post-privatization. More recently, Denmark ended letter deliveries altogether as the country saw a huge drop in letter volumes post-2000 and is instead adapting to the new digital world rather than keeping an archaic business model alive. Here at home, the federal government used to own an airline, a railway and an oil and gas company, all of which it eventually privatized as logic prevailed.

Canada Post is a financial boondoggle our policymakers can no longer ignore. Canadian taxpayers will continue to pay for future losses if Ottawa does not privatize Canada Post and allow it to modernize.

— Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen are research directors at the Fraser Institute

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