Posted on 06/15/2011 2:12:23 PM PDT by Clive
OTTAWA -- Federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt has given 48 hours notice of her intention to introduce a bill to end Canada Post's lockout.
"On behalf of Canadians in general and because we have a strong mandate on this economy to make sure it recovers, we have acted," Raitt said during Wednesday's question period in the House of Commons.
Only hours earlier, Raitt said she still had to evaluate the situation to determine the damage to the Canadian economy from the lockout.
Since the Commons won't sit on Friday because of the NDP policy convention, 48 hours notice for the back-to-work bill means Monday is the earliest MPs could deal with it.
NDP Leader Jack Layton isn't enthusiastic about the idea of government intervention in the Canada Post dispute.
"These things should be resolved at the bargaining table," said Layton. "That's how labour relations should be dealt with, especially when we're dealing with something that is still at the very early stages of dispute and discussion."
Meantime, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers slammed Canada Post for a lockout it calls "irresponsible."
"This decision from Canada Post to lock us out is really unacceptable," CUPW national president Denis Lemelin said Wednesday morning.
Canada Post insists the union's rotating strikes left it no choice because its strike-related losses have ballooned to $100 million.
Lemelin says the union has contacted a mediator to request an immediate meeting with Canada Post president and CEO Deepak Chopra.
Both sides have called on each other to be more flexible and have rejected the need for binding arbitration to settle their dispute.
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Maybe the Canadian postal workers could be NFL replacement players.
The biggest problem will be the coaches saying “we get 4 downs — 4 DOWNS”
We ship to Canada 100’s of times a year and their postal service is a nightmare. 1 in 10 packages dissapear. Customs often takes 3 to 5 weeks to clear 50.00 worth of retail product. It is 10 times easier to get a package into Africa then Canada. Not a guess it is real life experience.
Is it the postal service or customs that is the problem?
I bought a box of used paperbacks once on eBay and they were located in Canada. I paid $45 for 75 books. I was buying a lot of books back then and I didn’t notice that it had been 6 weeks and they had not arrived. Too late to lodge a complaint with eBay.
Another month passes and they show up. Postal cancels show they were mailed not long after I paid but had a delayed by customs label on the box. The weird thing is it was a Canadian delayed sticker. I could understand a US delay but why Canada.
I refused to buy anything large again from Canada.
The Canadian post office and customs both suck badly.
99% of our wholesale customers in the US refuse to send anything to Canada. We’re trying to get accounts who have global stores to handle our Canadian business. This way a container is cleared by customs forwarders who know who to call and who to work with (or bribe).
"Canadian customers tell me it is their customs agents that are the problem. Canada's bureaucracy is a nightmare much like what the socialist democrats want to create here."Canada Customs is an old line empire building bureaucracy suspicious of this new fangled thing called "free trade" and fearful of its potential to dismantle its empire.
Canada Post is not a government department. It is a Crown Corporation with a mandate to return a profit and it has done so for the past 16 years. It declares dividends just like any other corporation and pays the dividends to its only shareholder, the Crown in right of Canada. The dividends go into the consolidated revenue fund.
The corporation made a profit in its last fiscal year but unlike prior years it did not declare a dividend because it is re-investing the profit in a modernization program.
Back when I sold on eBay, I rarely had problems but I sold mostly photos which were not heavy.
“re-investing the profit in a modernization program.”
For our business and the customers we service this is great news. Canada is 5 to7% of our sales but could easily grow to 50% if we had any incentive to invest in marketing there.
My advise to them. Scan the packages! When our shipment electronically dissapears after it crosses that border? It gives us no confidence to invest in expansion to that market.
Customs in the U.S. is just as bad! My son who lives in Canada, one hour from the border to MT sent me a pair or child’s titanium glass frames for myself by priority post. They crossed the border in one day and then we could no longer track them. We checked in daily at the Main Post Office in Idaho Falls inquiring about them. Finally after a month they arrived, after sitting on a custom official’s desk in Seattle for all that time. Why would a pair of eyeglass frames sit on a U.S. custom official’s desk for so long, don’t they have the equipment to quickly scan such small packages and send them on their way? Hold ups can happen in either direction, but I detest the actions of CUPW which have held the citizens of Canada hostage usually around Christmas time almost every second year and nothing has ever been done about it! They are handsomely paid, they have taxi service paid to the start of their routes and then back to the post office and paid vacations and yet Canadians have laid back and accepted the semi-annual strike as something that is a regular event before the price of postage increases. Of course, since most of the strikes have happened under Liberal majority governments what else can I say? The Liberals would NEVER step in to mandate the workers back to work,(and the NDP are more Liberal than the Liberals re- Jack Layton the ever loving politician who when he was in Toronto City Council thought nothing of living in subsidized housing as a nice perk of his job when he could well afford to pay more for an apartment and let a poor person live in the apartment he was occupying) Thank God for small favors and a Majority Conservative Government! Finally a mandate to make the damned well paid workers get back to work and stop making Canadians hostage! Hurray! Posted by the Mrs Chief
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