The Canada Post strike may be on pause, but there’s still no way packages and cards sent through the mail system will make it by the holidays, experts say.
On Friday morning, federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon announced he’s asking the board to order Canada Post employees back to work and he is appointing an “industrial inquiry commission,” which will have until May 22 to probe potential ways to reach a new contract agreement.
But the backlog at Canada Post is so large, logistics experts say cards, letters and packages entering the system now will not make it in time.
Sarah Keller, a registered nurse in Sherwood Park, Alta., sends dozens of Christmas cards to family and friends every year. But the cost of sending cards via a courier would be cost-prohibitive, so this holiday season she’s going without.
“I’m disappointed that I won’t have that physical piece of joy waiting in my mailbox,” Keller, 44, said. “It’s a loss for me and probably for a lot of other Canadians.”
The rule of thumb for supply chain disruptions is that for every day a service is disrupted, it takes five days to clean up the mess, said Fraser Johnson, a professor of operations management at Western University’s Ivey Business School.
And that doesn’t include the time it will take to ramp up operations, prepare equipment in processing facilities and schedule workers to begin clearing the backlog, Johnson said.
“It’s not like going in the garage after you’ve been gone for three weeks and starting up your car,” Johnson said. “It’s probably going to be five days before they can even start to process stuff, I would expect, in some of these larger facilities.”
Johnson said the entire process of clearing the backlog could take around a month.
In a statement to the Star, Canada Post said it will “move any items in the system on a first-in, first-out basis, but it may take some time.”
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) referred questions relating to the postal backlog to Canada Post.
Jim Bookbinder, a professor of management science at the University of Waterloo, agreed the backlog will take weeks to clear, even if Canada Post works twice as fast as it normally does.
“They would have to work quite intensively and even so, I don’t think they can clear the backlog by Dec. 25,” Bookbinder said.
Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said there is no longer any hope that businesses could make deliveries via Canada Post by Christmas.
“We have already written off Canada Post as playing any role in the holidays this year,” Kelly said. “It is effectively dead as a doornail as a player for retail deliveries before the holidays.”
