Soldiers carry a TON of stuff. Physical fitness and strength are a big part of the job.

The main reason soldiers carry so much ammo is that suppressing fire is so critical to modern infantry tactics. Without suppressing fire of your own you’re going to get pinned down by enemy suppressing fire. An immobilized unit is a dead unit.

No, it’s not an outgoing weekly date. Mail gets sorted and transmitted to destination post offices every day. The only thing that happens once a week is delivery to / pickup from the community mailbox. And which day that happens on depends on which neighbourhood you live in.

Think of it like waste collection. It happens every day but each neighbourhood only gets collected once a week. I may get mine collected on Tuesdays but my friend who lives in a different area gets his collected on Wednesdays. Meanwhile, the normal operations of the landfill are running every weekday.

What this means is that the postal workers who just work in the post office sorting and filling trucks continue working every day as normal. However, the postal workers who drive around and fill up the community mailboxes will work a different route each day of the week. This means one postal worker can serve 5 times as many addresses as they currently do right now (where the same postal worker drives the same route every day). Additionally, that one worker will be carrying a full 7 days worth of mail to deliver to that community rather than only a single day worth of mail (or 3 days worth on a Monday).

Wrong. Businesses who send out large volumes of mail don’t wait for Canada Post to pick it up. They courier the mail to and from a CP sorting facility. I know this because I work in a mail room at a company. Even with weekly delivery for home addresses, businesses would still be sending and receiving mail on a daily basis.

Your bill would be produced and sent to a Canada Post sorting facility on the same day.

Furthermore, businesses are aware of mail transit delays. When they print the due dates on the bills they take this into account. Furthermore, businesses tend to have grace periods beyond the actual due date of the bill for this very reason.

Lastly, I will point out that the company I work for is still printing and inserting bills into envelopes even though the post offices are closed. This mail is packed in crates stacked floor to ceiling in the hallway and will be sent to Canada Post when the strike is over. If the strike goes on for a long time, many customers will receive their bills long after the due date. Customers are still expected to pay their bills on time although extra allowances are granted on a case by case basis. Many customers do use electronic transfers or pre-authorized debits from their bank accounts and so they don’t have any extra reason to miss a payment.

Call defence a service if you want. The point is that it doesn’t vary with supply and demand. The government decides how much it wants to spend on defence and that’s the budget.

Mail is different. If everyone sent 10x as much mail as we do now there wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the world we live in. Mail is in steep decline from 5.5 billion letters 2 decades ago to 2 billion today and dropping. Most of that mail is sent by businesses who are increasingly looking for ways to further cut it back.

The company I work for spends millions of dollars a year sending out mail, much of it to customers who have opted out of receiving mail but get it anyway because of legacy databases and slow-moving business decisions. The postal strike has a lot of managers now prioritizing the rectification of that issue. We’re going to see a huge drop in outgoing mail volumes and that will directly hit Canada Post’s bottom line.

Citation needed.

The military isn’t a public service. It’s the fundamental exercise of the government’s sovereignty over the country.

Canada Post doesn’t need to turn a profit either. But it shouldn’t be losing billions of dollars to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week when it could deliver weekly to community mailboxes (supplemented by home delivery for those in need) and provide the same vital service at a fraction of the cost.

The debate is not about shutting down Canada Post completely, it’s about scaling back service due to rapidly falling demand. You can still have a vital postal service with weekly delivery to community mailboxes. I have received my mail at a community mailbox for over 30 years. These days I check the mail maybe twice a month. It’s a 3 minute walk each way. People with limited mobility who live in a community mailbox area can already sign up for special home delivery.

Why do any of those need door to door delivery on a daily basis? None of them are that urgent.

You can have a vital postal service without paying postal workers $70,000/year to deliver junk mail door to door 5 days a week. Weekly delivery to community mailboxes plus supplemental home delivery for people with limited mobility would save a ton of money but it would mean laying off thousands of postal workers.

This whole dispute isn’t about a vital service, it’s about a jobs program that is unjustifiable in the modern day.

Without the military what’s stopping Trump from invading?

No you wouldn’t. Those are competitive industries, despite all the griping about Canadian banks and Rogers et al. Unless you’re going to turn Canada Post into a bank (and discontinue delivering mail) they’re not going to be viable just because you add banking service.

65% of Canada Post’s costs are the salaries of postal workers. Letter volume has dropped from 5.5 billion to less than 2 billion over the past 2 decades. Since the strike began, plans are in motion for many businesses that send a lot of mail to switch to electronic. Plenty of businesses that send out millions of letters per year are using the strike as a kick in the butt to switch to electronic. When the strike ends the volume won’t even come close to getting back to 2 billion.

Set a reminder? My phone is full of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reminders. I use my calendar as well for all kinds of events. I have repeated reminders and repeating alarms too. If you’re an older person (or just don’t like/trust technology, and I respect that) then you can use a paper calendar, daily planner, or a notebook.

But the argument that you need taxpayers to pay $70,000 a year salaries for postal workers to deliver bills to your front door because you would otherwise forget to pay your bills is an incredibly weak one.

Junk mail is one of the only things keeping Canada Post afloat. Get rid of it and you cut off a huge source of their revenue. And without it you’d have postal workers driving around with empty trucks delivering nothing at all most days.

I personally can go weeks between receiving actual envelopes addressed to me. Everything else is junk mail. Why should postal workers be paid $70k/year for this?

The postal workers would absolutely reject a plan for weekly door to door delivery because it would mean laying off tons of postal workers.

And how do you even make that work financially? Door to door delivery is insanely expensive, especially in rural areas. That means driving many km from farm to farm to deliver all the mail instead of just taking it to the town post office.

How is it possible to both lay off a ton of postal workers but be even less financially viable? It’s the per-letter costs. Door to door raises the per-letter costs and weekly delivery reduces the volume (because businesses who need daily delivery go elsewhere) and so you lay off a ton of postal workers but your volume falls off a cliff and you still lose money.

People who live in the country are already vehicle dependent anyway (no one’s living in the country ordering Uber Eats every day and paying a fortune on long distance delivery fees). It doesn’t hurt them to drive to the post office once a week (or even once a month) to get their mail.

I don’t use Amazon. But plenty of other businesses use Uber Eats and other gig worker couriers.

There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle on couriers. No one is paying $70,000/year (what their salary would be if they win the labour dispute) postal workers for delivering parcels.

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Phantasy Star Online.

Inheritance taxes for real farmers (as opposed to people who just buy farmland to live in the country) are much higher because they include capital expenditures. Modern tractors, harvesters, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, barns, equipment sheds, silos, fences, irrigation systems… all of this can add up to millions of pounds. Having to suddenly pay a large inheritance tax for a cash-strapped (high leverage) working farmer because their parent died could absolutely force the sale of everything.

Providing for one’s own children, passing on family traditions and ways of working, preserving the spaces where childhood memories are created; these are among the most fundamental of human desires. Take those away and your society gives way to nihilism. You make an enemy of every parent in the country.

On the other hand, a strong society understands this at a cultural level and the preservation of family traditions is deeply rooted in the society. This is where you get family farms, family restaurants, family workshops and small businesses that last for hundreds of years and produce some of the best products life has to offer. Japan, France, Italy, and Spain are some examples of countries where this is the case.

As for arbitrary restrictions on corporations: ad-hoc solutions like that rarely work. People find ways of circumventing and undermining such efforts. Instead of one corporation, people will have hundreds, each with its 10 hectares of land.

The more regulations you create, the more you reward people with the money to hire accountants and lawyers to navigate them. On the other hand, traditional farmers and other small family businesses will simply give up trying to navigate the red tape and bail out.

If you want to tax unearned wealth, you should implement land value tax which taxes the increase in value of a piece of land, not inheritance. A child who grows up on a farm and helps with all of the farm tasks their parents do every day has earned their inheritance. A suburbanite who has watched their house go from $200k to $2m in 20 years has not.

If I’m a parent in the twilight of my life and I own a big farm or a factory or some other productive asset and I’m facing steep inheritance taxes do you think I’m going to just accept them? No. I’d rather sell off all the equipment, burn the factory to the ground, treat the family to lavish vacations and parties for the rest of my life, and have them inherit nothing. If there’s no future to plan for, then live like there’s no future.

You’ll have to visit a priest who can remove curse. Be prepared to make a large donation to his church!