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WHY THE CANADA POST STRIKE IS NOT JUST A ‘LABOUR DISPUTE’  
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Rhea Rollmann
May 23, 2025
The Independent
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_ The weaponization of ‘balance’ increasingly permeates our
society. It emerges when powerful institutions call police to suspend
free speech or shut down protests in the name of ‘safety’ when
really, there’s no realistic danger. _

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Another year, another Canada Post strike.

At least, that’s how I began writing this column.

But it’s not really accurate, is it? It conveys an oddly balanced
impression of a deeply unbalanced labour dispute, and makes it unclear
who, if anyone, is responsible for the looming strike.

Here’s a much clunkier opener, and the sort that smacks of bias to
an uncritical reader, but it’s certainly closer to the truth:

_Another year, another series of anti-worker actions by the rich folks
on the board of Canada Post Corporation and the federal government,
which will continue to undermine Canadian postal services, spread
precarity, drive up costs for consumers and benefit their friends in
private industry._

As journalists, we have an obligation to think critically about the
language we use. In a time when truth and facts are under attack by
rich people willing to spend enormous sums of money
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skew and manipulate public perception on an “industrial scale
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it’s even more crucial that we be mindful of our language. By
‘we’ I mean journalists, scientists, medical professionals —
basically any discipline or profession that relies on rigorous,
critical thinking, investigation and analysis. We’re often rushed,
under-resourced, overworked and underpaid. But if we are to do our job
well, we _need_ to think about these things.

When we write our articles under the pressure of deadlines, it’s
easy to borrow others’ language, grab at the common phrases we all
know and hear and insert them into the stories we write. Rather than
wrestling with the nuances of apportioning responsibility, it’s much
easier—and less risky, in terms of having to spend time defending
what we write against potentially critical editors, readers, and the
general public—to write in such a way that taps uncritically into
the language of ‘balance’, that doesn’t assign blame, that
doesn’t require going out on a limb to say, ‘here’s what’s
actually going on and who or what is actually responsible for it.’

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in media coverage of the
ongoing genocide in Palestine, which Amnesty International
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the United Nations
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others have identified as a genocide, with at least 50,000
Palestinians killed in indiscriminate mass bombing and sniper attacks
by Israel and tens of thousands of children facing imminent risk of
starvation
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to Israeli blockades. Yet media continues
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refer to the genocide as the “Israel-Gaza War” (or the New York
Times’
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surreal “Israel-Hamas War”). It’s sort of like calling the Nazi
Holocaust the “German-Jewish War.”

There is no war. There’s an ongoing 77-year campaign of murder,
genocide and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by Israel—a rich and
powerful settler-colonial country armed and funded by even stronger
Western countries—against a poor and dispossessed people who have
few state allies and virtually no means to defend themselves, beyond a
frail, disproportionately faint attempt at armed resistance and
self-defense. There is no war, no balance there. There is one country
slaughtering tens of thousands of helpless civilians in a campaign of
hatred and slaughter that has no parallel in sheer scale and villainy
since the Nazi Holocaust.

But you wouldn’t know it from most headlines.

WEAPONIZING ‘BALANCE‘

Powerful people and institutions routinely justify their oppressive
and violent actions by arguing they’re reasonably or proportionately
equivalent to the event that prompted the response. These claims of
equivalency are often inaccurate or false and represent a
weaponization of balance, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, as
with Israel. But when media fail to identify false equivalency—and
when they perpetuate the problem by invoking a ‘balanced’ approach
to coverage, which often inaccurately assumes there are two sides to
any situation deserving equal airing—they wind up supporting the
violent actions of the powerful and distorting the actual truths that
could help the public understand a situation and respond in an
informed way.

The weaponization of ‘balance’ increasingly permeates our society,
including here in Newfoundland and Labrador. It emerges when powerful
institutions call police to suspend free speech or shut down protests
in the name of ‘safety’ when really, there’s no actual realistic
danger to anyone. It emerges when powerful and privileged public
figures (like elected officials or university
presidents) mischaracterize legitimate protest as bullying
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It emerges every time armed police officers kill unarmed civilians
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then claim self-defense
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Responsible media should never take such claims at face value,
especially when they come from the powerful.

BACK TO CANADA POST

An inaccurate use of ‘balance’ also emerges in reporting of labour
disputes. The post-WWII system of labour relations—a mixture of laws
governing labour standards, union certifications, and strikes and
lockouts—was intended to bring greater balance to the chaotic and
often violent field of worker-employer relations as it existed prior
to the mid 20th century. 

The early 20th century backdrop of wildcat strikes, industrial
sabotage, police violence, riots, assassinations and even gun battles
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havoc on the economy, so governments ushered in laws to create a more
orderly and balanced structure for resolving conflicts between
employers and workers, and impose some standards for fairness and
human rights in the workplace. But as corporate wealth has
ballooned—as conniving lawyers have inserted themselves into labour
disputes and right-wing governments have empowered corporations and
police at the expense of workers and the poor—the aspiration of
balance in labour relations has become deeply skewed
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the past few decades. The use of back-to-work legislation
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deprives workers of one of the only counterweights they
have—strikes—against outrageously wealthy and powerful
corporations and corporate directors, is part of that.

Yet labour disputes continue to be reported as disputes between
equals, a phenomenon exacerbated by the crisis in journalism, which
has seen countless local newspapers and other outlets shut down.
It’s also fuelled by the fact that dedicated labour reporters are
few and far between these days; labour disputes are now often covered
by business reporters who don’t understand the ins and outs of
labour relations and the structural factors underpinning the labour
movement.

When the federal government intervened in the Canada Post strike last
December, it extended collective agreements until May of this year,
after which point both parties were free to resume the conflict. But
the feds also commissioned an inquiry into the dispute, ostensibly in
an effort to offer clarity on the situation and produce
recommendations for a fair way forward. A lawyer, William Kaplan, was
commissioned to hold hearings, study the situation and produce the
report, which was released last week.

_Joanna Poe / Flickr
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REPORT SIDES WITH CANADA POST CORPORATION

Far from being a balanced assessment, the Industrial Inquiry
report—I read all 161 pages
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a shorter summary is available here
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sides with the corporation. All Canadians should be deeply concerned
about its recommendations, including an end to daily, door-to-door
mail delivery and allowing the corporation to close rural post
offices. It also recommends allowing the corporation to increase its
use of casual and temporary workers, paradoxically dismissing the
union’s concern that these workers won’t be treated well, and
without any explanation of how a casual or ‘temp’ job can be a
“good job” in the real world. The report wants to make it easier
for the corporation to raise postal prices, eliminating the safeguards
that presently exist to protect consumers.

It speaks the patriotic rhetoric of preserving a “nation-building”
public service, while rendering recommendations guaranteed to destroy
it. It evinces little understanding of what a ‘public service’ is,
or of government’s actual ability to strengthen a public service
through funding or regulatory means (such as cracking down on and
regulating the use of substandard private parcel delivery
companies). 

The report dips into the fantastical at times — an extended foray
into the tired and discredited fantasy future
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parcels are delivered by drones. It calls for allowing the corporation
the freedom to explore and experiment with new models. But when it
comes to the union’s proposals for new models, such as postal
banking, the report dismisses them in exactly opposite language: “it
is hard to imagine thinking that it is a good idea for an effectively
insolvent business to expand into non-core unproven activities with no
market and revenue projections.”

William Kaplan. _Toronto Metorpolitan University_.

Yet the report wants to give many of those very powers to Canada Post.
It says on one hand that, “in other countries, postal banking is
well established, and profitable,” yet on the other that the
union’s (CUPW) proposal to introduce this to Canada has an “air of
unreality (even if some dated polling results indicate varying degrees
of public support when some of them were presented in the
abstract).”

It would be hard to manufacture more biased language.

The only substantive reason given why this internationally successful
postal banking model would not work in Canada? Canadians
“increasingly bank on their phones.” The report points to the
widespread closure of bank branches as indication that postal banking
would not work here, completely ignoring the fact that the closure of
those branches is an ignominy that’s created countless hardship and
fury on the part of Canadians, while serving to increase profits for
banking elites.

The report also refers, in an appendix, to the 877 submissions it
received from municipalities, businesses, community groups and
individuals, the majority of whom leaned in favour of CUPW’s
position and concerns. Even submissions from small- to medium-sized
businesses warned of the catastrophe which an end to daily mail
delivery would bring. Yet in the end Kaplan’s report appears to side
with the corporation in opposition to all this strong public interest
in continuing to fund a vital public service.

The postal ‘dispute’ is no longer just about protecting a
union’s collective agreement; it’s a last-ditch effort to save the
public postal system in Canada. Canada Post Corporation and the
Industrial Inquiry are poised to deliver Canadians into a nightmarish
future without rural post offices, no daily mail delivery, costs that
will continue to spiral higher ever more quickly, and a greater
reliance on sub-standard private parcel delivery.

BACK TO BALANCE

The purpose of Canada’s labour relations system is supposed to be
about maintaining some kind of loose balance, between the overpowering
wealth of corporate employers and the needs of Canada’s working
class. Yet over the past three decades we’ve seen this system
disintegrate because corporate wealth has grown exponentially without
any realistic legislative checks on corporate power to protect working
Canadians and their unions. 

The system is out of balance. 

Labour disputes are no longer disputes between equals, if they ever
were. They represent collusion between private industry backed by
immense wealth and rich government representatives who wield
legislative power against relatively helpless and increasingly poor
Canadian workers whose only futile option is to go on strike and forgo
a paycheck until the government legislates them back to work. It’s a
broken system that benefits the rich, the corporations, and their
wealthy allies in government.

So let’s not call the looming Canada Post strike a ‘labour
dispute’. Instead, let’s call it what it is: a brazen attempt by
rich corporate directors to privatize, precaritize and ruin one of our
country’s core public services – the Canadian postal system. When
we write about strikes, let’s not uncritically objectify them as
alienated disputes between two equal parties; let’s acknowledge when
and where corporate power overwhelms that of working-class rights, and
let’s talk about the issues being fought over because they
increasingly affect all of us.

Above all, let’s remember that the language of balance—especially
where no balance exists—serves to benefit the wealthy and powerful
who gain from obscuring their disproportionate power and privilege in
situations like this. A completely false and manufactured impression
of balance in the Palestinian genocide has no doubt contributed to our
governments’ shameful failures to act to protect Palestinians
against Israeli war crimes. But this language has an impact on
domestic issues as well.

We live in a world increasingly characterized by ever more extreme
income gaps, obscene wealth accumulation, flagrant violations of human
rights and basic decency. We’ll never start moving toward a solution
if we can’t even honestly talk about the problem.

_Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and radio
producer/podcaster based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A
Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023). She’s a founding
editor of TheIndependent.ca, and a contributing editor with
PopMatters.com. Her writing has appeared in a range of popular and
academic publications, including Briarpatch, CCPA Monitor, rabble.ca,
Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Gender Studies, and more. She was
the recipient of an Atlantic Journalism Gold Award in 2017, and
finalist for a Canadian Association of Journalism Award in 2018. She
also has a background in labour organizing, and queer and trans
activism. She is presently Program Director at CHMR-FM, a community
radio station in St. John’s, NL._

_The Independent is Newfoundland and Labrador’s premiere outlet for
progressive news and analysis, and we do it without the corporate
funding that other media outlets depend on._

* Journalism
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* bias
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* Canada
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* Labor
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* canadian postal workers
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* Palestine
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