The idea that Canada Post could do more than deliver mail isn’t new.
Projects like Toronto’s Station K, just north of Eglinton Ave. W., off Yonge St., were once held up as glimpses of the future — a reimagined post office that could function as a retail destination, a civic access point, even a symbol of renewal for a declining institution.
It proved a short-lived experiment.
In retrospect, the royal cipher above the entrance, for Edward VIII, the short-reigning king who abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, feels like an oddly fitting omen.
That tension between ambition and retrenchment is still playing out.
In September, Canada Post received approval to end door-to-door delivery for the roughly four million remaining addresses that still receive it, bringing them in line with the rest of the country. Community, apartment and rural mailboxes will take over, with most conversions phased in over the next three to four years.
The postal service is now “effectively insolvent,” its CFO acknowledged recently. If this organization were proposed today as a stand-alone enterprise, the answer from any boardroom would be swift: don’t build it.
But that assumes Canada Post is meant to be a business in the conventional sense. It isn’t, and never really was.
What Canada Post actually operates is a national human network: trusted workers, on regular routes, showing up at nearly every household in the country, including places markets avoid because density doesn’t justify investment.
That network has been evaluated for years as a cost centre, when it may be one of the country’s more underutilized forms of social infrastructure.
A recent paper from the National Institute on Aging brings attention to that idea. The study doesn’t pretend to solve Canada Post’s financial challenges. Its contribution is more modest and arguably more persuasive.
Postal workers, the authors note, are among the most trusted professionals in the country. They already conduct daily visits to residences, often noticing changes in routine long before formal systems do. In a country facing rapid population aging, labour shortages in home care and rising health costs, that everyday human presence could support earlier intervention, reduce isolation and help seniors remain in their homes longer.
This isn’t speculative. Variations of letter carrier alert programs have existed in parts of Ontario for decades. France, Japan and the U.K. have integrated postal workers into light-touch wellness-check services that include brief visits, prescription delivery and co-ordination with local supports.
Of course, scaling social services is harder than launching pilots. Jurisdictional complexity matters. So do labour agreements, training, liability and consent. Canada Post is not a plug-and-play solution to systemic care shortages.
Still, Canada already pays for the hardest part of many preventive services: showing up.
This is where the business framing begins to shift. Rather than asking Canada Post to behave like a private courier while quietly absorbing nation-building obligations, a more honest approach would recognize it as a social enterprise.
Universal service would be funded explicitly. Commercial parcel operations would compete where viable. Care-adjacent services would be evaluated not just on revenue, but on system-wide savings and social return.
There’s also a broader economic context worth noting. As sectors from banking to retail to customer service automate aggressively, routine human interaction is disappearing. In that environment, human presence becomes scarce. And scarcity creates value.
Canada Post is one of the few remaining institutions where a representative of the system still appears at the door, in person, day after day.
Successive governments have preferred to let it drift as a “failing business” rather than confront the harder question of what public services are worth in a country defined by distance, aging and automation.
This isn’t a growth story. But it doesn’t have to be a slow-motion writeoff either.
The real risk isn’t that we’ll ask too much of Canada Post. It’s that we’ll fail to recognize the value of a national human network until it’s gone. And by then, no amount of technology will deliver what disappears with it.
