The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 21, 2025


Privatize Canada Post - Carney's Liberals are allowing another strike


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

185.52603

Word count

1,727

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wyatt Claypool argues that Canada Post should be privatized. He points to a CBC article and a chart showing how much Canada Post has been losing since 2017, and argues that it should be outsourced to a private firm.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.080 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here.
00:00:03.340 Ironically enough, today I am going to be arguing that Canada Post should be privatized, using CBC as my source today.
00:00:12.000 I don't know why we need this to be a public crown corporation.
00:00:16.180 It loses money every year, and there are constant strikes from unions that the government doesn't really want to solve
00:00:22.180 because they think by pleasing the unions they're buying votes,
00:00:25.420 and I think that is too tempting for the government, or at least the problem is too difficult for the government to manage,
00:00:31.360 so it should just be outsourced to a private firm.
00:00:35.300 Mail delivery, I keep hearing, doesn't have a lot of money in it, especially letters, but Amazon made packages work.
00:00:41.700 I don't think that a company like Amazon or another company would have a difficult time monetizing the delivery of letters.
00:00:49.480 But right now, we are heading into another Canada Post worker strike.
00:00:54.260 Why? Because the Liberals refused to solve the problem. 1.00
00:00:58.960 Back in December, when Canada Post workers were striking and not delivering any packages or letters in the month of December,
00:01:06.780 we had the Liberals wanting to engage in negotiations, and can we wait for a couple months, guys?
00:01:12.980 And it was just putting off the problem, because the problem right now is that the Liberals rely on public sector workers voting for them,
00:01:20.900 which means that taxpayers are the only ones being bargained against in all these situations.
00:01:26.760 Taxpayers have to pay for all the bad government deals that they make with the unions at Canada Post,
00:01:33.300 and so we will just continue to suffer if the Liberals are in power.
00:01:37.340 So if the Conservatives get in, goodness me, they have to make sure to privatize Canada Post.
00:01:42.940 Now, I'm going to be citing a CBC article that even shows a chart for how much they've been losing.
00:01:48.820 It's insane.
00:01:50.480 Look at this.
00:01:51.380 How bad is it?
00:01:52.520 About as bad as it gets.
00:01:54.140 The last time it made profit was 2017.
00:01:56.800 Since then, it has lost $3 billion.
00:01:58.800 The annual loss in 2023 was $748 million, even worse than 2022, when it lost $548 million, according to the latest annual report.
00:02:10.540 And I doubt it's gotten any better since 2023.
00:02:13.460 Obviously, 2020, it lost more money since more people are potentially delivering packages.
00:02:20.480 And so because it does its, you know, its function is done at a loss, the more people mail stuff, the more losses that we incur.
00:02:29.340 Just put it out of its misery at this point and just get rid of it.
00:02:33.160 This is a signal failure of the Trudeau Liberals and now the Carney Liberals.
00:02:38.260 They have only bloated the Crown Corporations more as they lose money.
00:02:43.040 When I see Mark Carney saying that, you know what, I think I can find $28 billion of savings within government in order to pay for my increased spending, I don't believe him.
00:02:55.320 Because if he was serious about it, I would hear the word CBC and Canada Post come off his lips and immediately be followed by the word privatization.
00:03:05.520 Because these things only lose us money.
00:03:08.140 We make no money off the CBC.
00:03:09.940 We don't make money off the Canada Post.
00:03:12.460 And there are many more agencies, bigger and smaller, who also don't actually serve a purpose other than employing people to do a job at too high a cost for taxpayers.
00:03:22.980 We could have Amazon do this. 0.96
00:03:24.720 We could have anyone do this.
00:03:26.540 Curulator could do this.
00:03:27.720 We could have UPS do this.
00:03:29.180 They would probably expand their operations to do it.
00:03:32.020 I always hear that there's not a business case for something.
00:03:34.340 And then the government entity goes bankrupt and somehow the private sector picks it up and makes it profitable.
00:03:40.080 Because it turns out the people in government are just bad at running things.
00:03:43.980 Just because they can't run it for a profit doesn't mean it's not profitable.
00:03:47.400 It just means that they suck at their jobs.
00:03:49.180 And so what I am seeing here is a great opportunity for conservatives to put pressure on the liberals to get rid of Canada Post.
00:03:56.960 Because if Carney is serious, he will do it.
00:03:59.240 And if he's not serious, he's going to indict himself by showing that he will refuse to get rid of this dead weight because he likes the dead weight.
00:04:07.260 That is the problem with Mark Carney.
00:04:09.140 He got into office because of dead weight.
00:04:11.440 If you took away the increased amount of votes the liberals got from more federal employees existing in 2025 than they did in 2015, they would have lost the election.
00:04:22.340 There's like another 500,000 people who work for the federal government, whether directly or indirectly, who will always vote for the government or for the party,
00:04:31.940 who will make sure to maintain what are a lot of the times fake jobs or give them more money.
00:04:37.960 That is what Canada Post workers are doing right now.
00:04:40.060 They see the liberals and they see the people that the liberals have put in charge of Canada Post as easy marks.
00:04:46.520 And these people will buckle, give you a 5% wage increase, increase your benefits.
00:04:51.120 This is all over the fact that Canada Post was trying to be a little bit more fiscally responsible and was going to hire weekend employees to deliver mail on the weekends.
00:05:01.040 Canada Post doesn't want part-time employees doing it.
00:05:03.280 They want it to be an only overtime role so that people who work there can then get like double wages for working Saturdays and Sundays.
00:05:11.920 This is also the problem with our health care system across Canada in the different provinces.
00:05:16.900 So many people, because it's understaffed, because so many people who are nurses just work in HR positions or administrative positions.
00:05:23.040 The people who still do work in nursing, who are doctors, in a clever way, they can just refuse to show up to work if they're not exactly scheduled in.
00:05:31.860 So we have nurses and doctors, mostly nurses, who only work part-time. 0.93
00:05:36.580 And they'll only come in if you offer double-time or triple-time.
00:05:40.600 I've heard this goes on, which means that our health care systems are extremely bloated with personnel salaries because people don't actually work regular hours and they're only ever paid in double-time wages.
00:05:52.980 It's ridiculous.
00:05:53.980 And now we have Canada Post workers probably wanting to bloat the budget by another couple or a hundred million a year.
00:06:01.460 And you've got to ask yourselves, how many of these do we have that exist?
00:06:05.180 We're running a $62 billion deficit and at least nearly $1 billion of it is coming from Canada Post.
00:06:12.080 We have another billion of it coming from the CBC.
00:06:14.940 If we find another dozen or two of these and then we just cut wasteful spending in other areas, we could have surpluses from here until the end of time.
00:06:24.820 Going back to the CBC article here.
00:06:27.860 I like this.
00:06:28.860 Fewer letters.
00:06:29.600 This is what's being blamed on them not making as much money.
00:06:32.560 Canada Post hit peak letter delivery nearly 20 years ago.
00:06:36.200 In 2006, it delivered 5.5 billion letters.
00:06:39.300 In 2023, it only delivered 2.2 billion letters and that includes a lot of bills and other official correspondents.
00:06:46.860 A lot of people in this country have grown up never knowing the practice of writing a letter to someone and putting it in the mail.
00:06:53.140 Yeah.
00:06:53.380 And so why?
00:06:54.660 Why do we have this?
00:06:56.320 It sounds like an established corporation could easily handle 2.2 billion letters.
00:07:02.220 We don't need this bloated crown corporation doing 5.5 billion. 0.98
00:07:06.000 And it's probably good that there's not as much mail going through right now because if you increase the amount of mail, they would probably lose more money on the delivery of it.
00:07:15.160 But, yeah, it's showing all how the delivery or the amount has been going down over time.
00:07:19.960 But, again, the amount of money it takes to do it has also been going up.
00:07:24.920 And when that's happening over time, when, in fact, things should be becoming more efficient, it tells you that it's basically just become a slush fund for unions.
00:07:32.840 It is just a way of being able to give very, very well-paid, cushy union jobs.
00:07:37.860 And I know there are people in my audience who like unions.
00:07:40.920 At the same time, guys, why do you think the Detroit auto industry went under?
00:07:44.560 Why do you think there are so many businesses and industries that are complete basket cases in Canada?
00:07:50.000 Because you must go through unions to get any of your labor unless it's just going to be you running the business.
00:07:56.100 And so you end up having massive amounts of your money go into wages, unrealistically high wages, and then your business never grows.
00:08:04.800 We are in such a stagnant economy because of stuff like this.
00:08:08.700 And, again, Carney's not going to handle it because he's never actually vocalized a problem with places like the CBC and Canada Post.
00:08:15.780 The two easiest crown corporations to criticize won't say anything about them.
00:08:20.440 He will say, well, I think we can find double spending.
00:08:23.360 Maybe there are duplicate programs we can get rid of.
00:08:26.460 Maybe there are duplicate programs.
00:08:28.580 I really don't think that that's really going to be much of a problem.
00:08:32.980 I don't think there's that many, like, billion-dollar savings to be had in, like, two programs that are effectively the same.
00:08:38.940 We could eliminate one.
00:08:40.400 That's not really going to be a solid avenue for cutting stuff.
00:08:44.380 It needs to be like stuff I can't approach.
00:08:45.820 It needs to be privatized.
00:08:46.720 And, by the way, once it's privatized, it will be profitable, and then it will be putting money back into the tax pool.
00:08:53.540 What a concept.
00:08:55.380 But, anyways, that should be it for this little rant today, guys.
00:08:58.880 I'm in Montana right now, so I'm on a bit of an alternative set.
00:09:02.260 The lightning's not very good.
00:09:03.220 You can see this whole sod getting washed out as the sun comes up a little bit.
00:09:07.260 But hopefully you don't mind this.
00:09:09.020 I'll be here for a few days.
00:09:10.100 Then I'm coming back to Calgary.
00:09:11.340 Then I'm going to Victoria.
00:09:12.440 Life's busy these days, but hopefully you didn't mind this video, and I'll see you guys next time.