It’s a good-news, bad-news story for Financial Literacy Month in Canada.
The good news, according to BMO’s fifth annual Financial Literacy Month survey: 97% of respondents give themselves a passing grade for financial literacy acumen. They’ll need that generous self-
assessment considering that, as Statistics Canada numbers showed earlier this year, the country’s household debt-to-income ratio rose to a record 164.6% in 2015’s second quarter, and, while a recent TD Economics analysis reported that Canadian household financial vulnerability has stabilized since 2011, it remains high, especially in B.C., Alberta and Ontario.
On a national Crown corporate level, the good news for Financial Literacy Month is harder to find. Consider, for example, recent word from Canada Post that it’s suspending its prudent plan to convert door-to-door mail delivery to community mailboxes. Canadian Union of Postal Workers representatives were predictably “ecstatic” over that about-face in the wake of the federal Liberals securing a majority government in the October 19 federal election.
But taxpayers will be less pleased.
As Canada Post president and CEO Deepak Chopra pointed out in the Crown corporation’s 2014 annual report, “the unprecedented volume decline of letter mail places enormous pressure on our finances.”
Converting the last third of the country’s door-to-door mail delivery addresses to community mailboxes, he wrote, was a key part of preventing Canada Post from becoming a “burden on taxpayers.”
The negative impact on Canada Post’s bottom line from electronic communications displacing letters was documented in the Conference Board of Canada’s 2012 The Future of Postal Service in Canada report.
It calculated that even with online shopping generating a projected 26% increase in parcel mail delivery by 2020, Canada Post’s annual operating loss would hit close to $1 billion. Backtracking on its decision to eliminate the door-to-door delivery of a rapidly declining form of communication begs questions over the state of financial literacy in the Crown corporation’s boardroom.
