Canada Post seeks monopoly
Back in the late 1980s, Canada Post thought the best way to
deal with growing competition for international mail was "to provide
consistently competitive outbound service levels, and consistently
good inbound service."
That might sound like heresy coming from a public sector
monopolist, but in the early 1990s the Post Office went even further
to embrace the spirit of competition. For four years it actually
owned a slice of a private company that was competing for
international mail.
But those days are behind it. Gone is any trace of private-sector
mindset as the Crown corp falls back on the monopolist's credo,
"Don't join 'em, beat 'em."
The weapon of choice to administer that beating is a legal cudgel
that, the Post Office seems to believe, just gets thicker and more
threatening with time.
Indeed, 18 years ago, if you believe Canada Post, the legal
principle it's now using to assail its competitors didn't even
exist. According to a Canada Post newsletter of 1988, mail that
Canadians sent overseas "is not protected by exclusive privilege,
which leaves this lucrative business open to a new threat —
aggressive competition from international remail companies."
That looks to me like a solid interpretation of the sloppily
written Canada Post Corporate Act, which hasn't changed since 1980,
when I read it in English. But early this decade, somebody at Canada
Post must have read the act in French. And in our other official
language — though this subtly eludes me when I stumble through the
French text — it may say the opposite.
Based on the formerly widespread, 20-plus year interpretation of
the act — a view once shared by Canada Post — a sizeable industry
has sprung up.
The first targets of Canada Post's reinterpretation of the act are
"remailers" — companies that collect large quantities of mail from
commercial customers and ship it to another country for posting. BobWipf, the Vancouver manager of Spring Global Mail, a major remailer,
says his company can deliver mail originating in Canada anywhere in
the world for less than Canada Post would charge, and in some cases
for only a third as much.
Although Canada Post once owned a slice of Spring's predecessor
company, T and T International Mail, the Crown corporation now says
the firm's main business activity is illegal. It has taken one of
Spring's two major competitors, Key Mail, to court to prove that
contention, and it is threatening Spring with the same.
So far, two Ontario courts have found in favour of Canada Post.
The relevant section in English says, ". . . the Corporation has
the sole and exclusive privilege of collecting, transmitting and
delivering letters to the addressee thereof within Canada." The
three gerunds — collecting, transmitting and delivering — had long
been interpreted to mean a single process.
But the French section says,
". . . la Societe a, au Canada, le privilege exclusif du relevage
et de la transmission des lettres et de leur distribution aux
destinataires." The inclusion of that first "et", the judges ruled,
means the act meant to grant exclusive privilege to each of those
three actions independent of the others.
What horrifies me about this ruling is the message that due
diligence to ensure compliance with the law can't be done just in
one official language. Apparently that's not a new principle of
Canadian law, but it's new to me. And as someone who's fluent in
only one official language — as are are millions of my fellow
citizens — I find it chilling.
I believe it ought to be a principle of basic justice that when a
law or regulation is too sloppy to be readily understood, it's the
law-maker's fault, not the so-called law-breaker's. Especially when
people — companies or individuals — have made investments or based
their actions on what were widely accepted interpretations that
suddenly change.
And it's not just Key Mail or Spring that Canada Post is targeting.
The Canadian International Mail Association says it sees the Key
Mail suit, which is being appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada,
as just a first round in a bid to kill thousands of jobs and a
$100-million-a-year industry. In the Lower Mainland alone, Wipf
says, the fate of perhaps 15 companies and 700 employees is at
stake.
In a presentation last year to the National Association of Major
Mail Users, Canada Post fingered as illegal several common business
activities:
– Remailers who post from abroad large volumes of letters from
Canadians to either Canadian or foreign addresses.
– Companies that produce mail in and send it from the U.S. with a
Canadian return address.
– American companies that get printing done in Canada and take the
letters across the border to post them to Americans.
– Canadian companies that truck their own U.S.-bound mail across
the border;
– Full service letter shops that do a broad spectrum of work for
American mass-mailers;
– Companies that send mail to a third country, such as Singapore,
for remailing to the U.S.
The Key Mail case continues to wend through the courts, but the
international mail association wants to cut it off at the pass.
They're pressing the new federal government to rein in Canada Post
and declare a moratorium until the issue is fully reviewed.
That's a good idea. Bad laws — and every sloppy law is a bad one
— should be fixed by parliament, not by hair-splitting courts.
Photo: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun / Bob Wipf, territory
manager for international bulk-mail shipper Spring, which is being
sued by Canada Post over their right to operate certain types of
mailing services.
Copyright Vancouver Sun 2006
