Canadian retailer drops Canada Post as its carrier ahead of holiday season

Province of Canada co-founder Julie Brown says they’re leaving Canada Post after 11 years, switching to alternative carriers for deliveries.

This holiday season, one Canadian retailer says its using alternative carriers after relying on Canada Post for more than 10 years to deliver their products to their clients.

Province of Canada co-founder Julie Brown says with all their merchandise made in Canada, and with most of their clients in Canada, it made sense to use Canada Post as their carrier.

• READ: Canada Post, union reach tentative agreements, with vote expected in new year

Although Canada Post and the union representing postal workers reached a tentative agreement for a new contract on Monday, it follows two years of negotiations that has led to labour disputes and strikes, causing major disruptions for businesses that rely on the Crown service.

Because of this, Brown says it was best to switch carriers.

“After last year’s strike and then this September, we just didn’t feel we had the confidence to go into the holiday season with them again, which saddened us because we’ve used them for the last 11 years,” Brown told CTV News Channel on Tuesday. “But we had to go a different route this holiday season. We just couldn’t afford to have the disruptions we had last year.”

“We had to replace them with four to five other carriers to make it work this year, but at least we didn’t have to deal with the strike,” she added.

Earlier this year, Canada Post reported losing $407 million in the second quarter. It also said that 2025, which will be the eighth consecutive year it lost money, was expected to be the worst fiscal year in the Crown corporation’s history.

• READ: ‘Government would likely step in’: Canada Post unlikely to go under, analyst says

The postal service has recognized that continued unresolved negotiations between it and its union, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), significantly impacted its business.

Butterpot Designs in Kitchener, Ont., and Lemon & Lavender in Toronto are among the other businesses who have also opted to go with other carriers this holiday season, due to lack of trust in Canada Post to deliver.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) says many Canadian businesses have expressed similar concerns.

“Businesses have learned the hard way that Canada Post is an increasingly unreliable provider of delivery services - and so many have made decisions to permanently move away from Canada Post,” Dan Kelly, CFIB President, told CTVNews.ca last month.

For Brown, she says last year’s holiday strike made her think twice about using Canada Post this time around.

“Last Christmas was really challenging on so many levels,” she said. “I felt like our entire staff, we were just dealing with it, trying to figure out what was going to happen everyday.

“We were spending more time on logistics than we were on customers and marketing,” she added.

The tentative agreement would be in effect until Jan. 31, 2029, which includes a 6.5 per cent wage increase in the first year and a three per cent increase in the second. The agreement also covers both the Urban and Rural and Suburban Mail Carrier (RSMC) bargaining units.

However, while Brown has always loved the service Canada Post provided, she says there is still too much instability to switch back right now.

“We were in quite a pickle last year, which is why this year we were like, ‘this is out of the question, we just can’t go down this path again without real certainty that we can rely on Canada Post,’” she said.

Brown adds that if Canada Post and the union are able to sort things out, they would reconsider going back to them next Christmas.