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The CEO of Canada Post says the company expects to lose up to 30,000 employees to retirement or voluntary departure over the next decade as the Crown corporation looks to shrink its workforce and modernize the service.
“Going forward, we will need to be a leaner organization and align our operations to the modern needs of the country and our financial reality,” Doug Ettinger told Canada Post’s annual meeting Tuesday.
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“It will need some change, but we can do it in a way that minimizes the impact on our people.”
He said the company will use “attrition first” to downsize from the roughly 62,000 people it employed at the end of last year.
The company expects to shed 16,000 employees through retirement or voluntary departures by 2030, with an additional 14,000 leaving by 2035.
Ettinger did not say whether additional layoffs will be needed to meet the financial targets in the coming years. Canada Post did go through a wave of management layoffs earlier this year.
Talk of downsizing the postal service came on the heels of stark new figures showing the extent of Canada Post’s financial decline.
Chief financial officer Rindala El-Hage said earlier in the meeting the corporation is “effectively insolvent,” with losses in the first nine months of the year topping $1 billion — $239 million more than the loss posted in the same period in 2024.
She said the company recorded an “unprecedented” loss before taxes of $541 million in the third quarter alone — beating the previous record for the largest quarterly loss in Canada Post’s history, which was set in the second quarter of this year.
Canada Post accumulated losses before tax of $3.8 billion between 2018 and 2024. El-Hage said the company is tracking for its steepest annual loss yet in 2025.
Ettinger said Tuesday that Canada Post’s business model is deteriorating, with fewer letters being sent every year. Stiff competition in the parcel delivery space and disruptions from an ongoing labour dispute with the Crown corporation’s largest union are also driving the company deeper into the red.
In January, the federal government opened up a $1.034-billion repayable loan to Canada Post, to be tapped as needed through the year to maintain solvency and support its operations.
El-Hage said Tuesday the company used $755 million of that loan in third quarter of the year alone, plus an extra $200 million drawn from outside that quarter.
“Unfortunately, the reality today is that when Canada Post loses money, taxpayers are footing the bill,” Ettinger said.
“That is not only unsustainable, it is unnecessary, and quite frankly, it’s unacceptable.”
Ettinger said leaning on the federal government for ongoing lifelines is not a workable strategy and changes made to the postal service’s mandate in September will help the company adjust its operations to the modern realities of mail delivery.
Canada Post submitted a plan to the federal government earlier this month to capitalize on those changes but details of the proposal won’t be made public while Ottawa reviews it.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 18, 2025.
