In this new world of high-tech revolutions, artificial intelligence and fly-to-the-moon communication technologies, the last thing on the minds of Canadian political and economic leaders is boots-on-the-ground businesses such as delivering the mail. As a result, nobody is paying much attention to Canada Post, the Crown corporation charged with maintaining a national postal service in a dynamic environment that doesn’t really need an old-fashioned low-tech postal service.

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Terence Corcoran: Money-losing Canada Post looks to ESG for salvation Back to video

On Wednesday, during an annual public meeting held online, Canada Post executives outlined their strategic “transformation plan” to lift the corporation out of its money-losing direction. It’s a big lift, especially since much of the transformation strategy appears to be based on positioning Canada Post as the ESG corporate capital of Canada.

Over the past fiscal year, Canada Post reported that its core business — a network of 5,200 post offices and 68,000 employees that delivered 6.6 billion pieces of mail and parcels — recorded a pre-tax loss of $548 million on $7.1 billion in revenues. Another $107-million loss hit during the first quarter of 2023. Since its last year of profit in 2018, Canada Post’s core business has lost more than $1.7 billion. (See graphs.)

The mail/parcel losses have dragged down the whole operation, which also includes the profitable Purolator courier business. On total consolidated 2022 revenue of $10.1 billion, Canada Post lost $292 million — bringing consolidated losses since 2017 to more than $1.3 billion.

Despite the losses, Canada Post executives delivered upbeat promises that there would be no cutbacks in service. “There are no plans at all for any cuts in service,” CEO Doug Ettinger said at the annual meeting, thereby putting to rest the idea that mail delivery frequency should be reduced to three days a week. There are also “no plans at this time” for layoffs. There are also no plans apparently to increase postal rates to cover costs.

Is this a business strategy, or a political strategy aimed at consumers of mail services — i.e. voters — but also for the benefit for the Canadian Union of Postal Employees, whose executives have been warning the corporation not to reduce losses by targeting union members. ”It can’t be the workers who pay the price,” said CUPW.

And they will not. Keeping customers and workers — and its political masters — in a good mood seems to be a core objective of Canada Post’s transformation strategy.

Without doing a timed breakdown of the online annual meeting, a rough estimate would be that about 50 per cent of the discussion focused on Canada Post’s strategic plan to adopt the latest environmental, social and governance (ESG) mantras —including commitments to net zero carbon emissions. Television viewers would be familiar with Canada Post commercials claiming to be operating a “carbon-neutral shipping” system, a trick accomplished by continuing to run fossil-fuel vehicles but offsetting the emissions through purchases of carbon offsets.

Ettinger’s emphasis on ESG, Indigenous topics and other feel-good social issues may help generate political and popular support, but the real challenge is competition. “We’re in the parcel business, that’s where we’ve placed our bets for the next five, 10 years,” Ettinger said.

The CEO was aggressively expansionary in his descriptions of Canada Post’s plans. “Part of our plan is to delight our customers to a level they have never seen before.” Plant expansions, including 14 new facilities, new services, new processes, even robotics, will be deployed as Canada Post seeks to compete for the ever-growing e-commerce market for parcel delivery.

Not only would the corporation stick with five-day mail delivery, it might expand its mid-week parcel delivery service into the weekend to meet competitive pressures. Weekend delivery is “becoming the norm,” said Ettinger, who added that weekend services could account for 25 per cent of service in a few years. “It’s a big issue.”

Canada Post’s confident message is that it has identified the e-commerce challenges it now faces. But can it meet those challenges while simultaneously holding on to its money-losing boots-on-the-ground door-to-door mail service? One must admire the optimism.

• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran