January 23, 2024

It is the regular story—made popular recently by Piketty—of the wealthy gaining wealth on their investments and working people becoming poorer because they have not wealth to gain wealth on.

The more wealthy you are, the less interest rates hurt you and the more you are able to absorb price increases.

• The lowest 20% of earners were the only ones to see their disposable incomes be reduced at the end of 2023.
• Savings declined as cost of living outran wage gains.
• Net investment income was reduced because of increased interest payments, more than half of which was due to consumer credit:

Highest income earners, of course, fared the exact opposite. Higher interest rates mean investment income increased faster than debt payments. And, 75% of the increase in interest payments (on debt) went to mortgages.

Income inequality increased in the third quarter as the gap in the share of disposable income between households in the two highest income quintiles (top 40% of the income distribution) and two lowest income quintiles (bottom 40% of the income distribution) reached 44.9%, up 0.5 percentage points from the third quarter of 2022. (StatCan)

And, young people are not able to access mortgages to buy housing, keeping the next generation out of making money from home asset appreciation. A major decline in the take-up of mortgage debt by the under 35 year olds since 2022:

Younger people are less likely to be paying into a mortgage, but their debt interest payments have increased substantially.

High interest rates have created a major strain on the wealth creation for the next generation of workers.

Canada Post Group of Companies (the rather fake holding company that owns Canada Post) is selling both its IT services and "Logistics" company. This comes after a private sector consultant process saying that it was "falling behind" and not being profitable.

You will be forgiven for not hearing of these two companies being sold off:

• SCI
• Innovapost

These are services Canadians paid for to develop. SCI is the largest logistics firm in Canada. Innovapost is a front-runner IT services company.

Innovapost is being sold to Deloitte.

Purolator is likely next.

The only thing that Canada has not delivered on withing the OECD plan was to sell Canada Post off to the private sector. This program of deranged neoliberalism was the last part of the privatization agenda outlined in the 1990s. It was the last major asset that Canadians had that created more value than was subsidized for.

And, now the Liberals have ensured that it is doomed to the private sector except for the money losing aspect of delivering paper mail.

Canada Post has pretended that it has a plan to invest in ecommerce delivery. It is a fictional notion since all delivery is basically ecommerce delivery, but it is setting itself up to be chopped up and sold off even more. This is because a Crown company that the government will not subsidize cannot compete with fly-by-night private delivery van services.

Should it even try? Yes, it should have but not because it can do it cheaper or better. Part of the reason we have an ecommerce program that is so exploitative is that instead of sustaining a parcel and mail delivery system that is standardized and centralized, we allow the hyper exploitation of workers. The price of delivery should be a true representation of the costs of delivery services.

We will complain in a few years that we cannot get things delivered cheaply when the price of delivery finally rises to match the true costs.

We will also wonder why the government cannot figure out logistics for needed public goods and services. Think crisis/pandemic-related delivery of drugs, essentials.

Working conditions and pay for delivery drivers will be pushed up either by the workers organizing or by legislation demanding an end to the levels of exploitation and mess of working environments. It is inevitable that this happens and when it does the impacts of the loss of Canada Post will be felt by the consumer as we face large for-profit commercial delivery fighting over the scraps with poorly paid workers.

CUPW has been asking for the expansion of service delivered by Canada Post. The problem is that this is not a program supported by the Liberals or Conservatives because these parties do not support the continued existence of publicly owned companies, never mind their expansion.