Avi at the Picket Line

“Our postal service isn’t a business—it’s the veins and arteries connecting communities across this land.”

Every day Avi Lewis and his team are out there in the community working to make things better.

What follows is an update directly from Avi:

"I had an amazing time on the picket line with CUPW with a group of volunteers from my election campaign in Vancouver centre! Fruit and muffins, honking horns of solidarity, and postal workers telling us the kind of inside stories you can only get from walking the walk (and that’s a Postie specialty!)

Strikes are battles of narrative as much as bargaining, and the reporting on this one has been predictably pathetic. Sadly, CBC is a big part of this problem - ironic, as it's another essential public service that has been made crappier by decades of pressure from the forces of privatization.

This is not just a story of small businesses suffering a big hit in their busiest season, or kids sad about not getting letters to or from Santa (although it is both of those things too!)

This is a story of market failure. Of Liberal and Conservative governments forcing the oldest, most fundamental public service to act like a business - when in a country this vast, that is a completely absurd priority for the postal service.

Here’s the truth: our postal service isn’t a business, it’s the circulatory system of our body politic. The veins and arteries connecting communities across the land. For the North, for rural communities, for remote communities, for Indigenous communities - it’s a more-than-essential service for commerce, medicine, even food. There’s no business model for that: it’s what government is for. It’s absurd that Ottawa carved the postal service out of government in the first place!

CUPW has always been a principled, progressive force in Canada. Their Delivering Community Power campaign (which I was honoured to help launch on Leap Day in 2016) is a stirring example of the kind of policy we need to mend our tattered national fabric.

It’s a vision that includes public banking to serve remote and marginalized communities abandoned by the fossilized Canadian banking cartel known as the Big Five. It would use that essential financial public service to fund local renewable energy and retrofit projects (among other public goods). These investments would return benefits directly to communities, rather than distant investors and their billionaire overlords.

Postal banking could be the foundation of democratic local economies - not to mention chasing predatory payday lenders out of working class neighbourhoods. Delivering Community Power is a vision that would also see Posties checking in on seniors, making sure people have their meds, delivering local food, and expanding their role in knitting together our communities with care and consistency.

And CUPW is continuing its fighting tradition by refusing to throw new and part time workers under the bus in this contract dispute. Canada Post wants to make itself into Junior Amazon Delivery, with wickedly exploited and underpaid workers slinging packages around the clock, 365 days a year, under ridiculous pressure and stress.

Posties are standing up against that dystopian vision, and won’t allow Canada Post to bring in a new underclass of precarious workers. The union is battling the introduction of crappy jobs into the public service. That fight in itself is a public service for all!

A couple more things I learned on the picket line…

Did you know that Canada Post bought Purolator in 1993, less than a decade after it was made “arms-length”? If you’ve had to pick up a parcel at Purolator in the past 3 weeks, you’ve had a glimpse of the future the corporation wants for us: chaos, understaffing, stress, and working class people battling each other while CEOs and shareholders rake in profits.

So I stand with CUPW! In this right wing populist clownshow we live in today, every labour battle is a battle for the whole working class.

Oh, and who do you think has been collecting, writing responses to, and delivering all those Santa letters for the past 40 years? Postal workers of course!

Many of them are retired or off the clock and even during this strike - they do it out of a deep sense of public service, not some pressure from the bosses for balanced books or corporate profit. That’s not what our postal service is or should ever be."

 

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