Tag Archives: Canada post

The End of Canada Post and the Coming War for Your Mailbox

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As pretty much everyone in Canada learned yesterday (and no one outside the country cares to know), Canada Post, the country’s national postal service will phase out home mail delivery by 2019.  The reason? It’s obvious. The internet has hammered mail volumes. There was 20% less mail delivered in 2012 than 2006. And 6 of that 20% decline occurred in 2012 alone, suggesting the pace is accelerating.

First, I’m really quite happy about (the long term implications of) the demise of home delivery. For me, Canada Post has become a state sanctioned spamming infrastructure. When the little red dot on my mailbox rubs off (as it recently did) the volume of actual wanted mail versus unsolicited mail I receive runs at at least 20% versus 80%. Indeed, the average Canadian household got 1,178 flyers in 2010. About 22 a week. And that doesn’t even count unaddressed mail.

I shudder to think of the colossal waste of paper and energy created by the production, shipping, delivery and recycling the essentially endless circulation of this vast pulp forrest. All the more so given less than 3% probably ever gets looked at, much less read.

The problem is, in the short term at least, things may get worse. Or at least messier. One way of thinking about this change is that your front door just got massively deregulated. I suspect a whole new level of unwanted and unsolicited mail spam is about to hit the more densely populated swaths of the country. So much so, I expect we are going to see – in fact demand – new legislation to regulate physical spam.

Let me explain.

Up until now the cheapest way to send you spam – unsolicited mail or even just targeted advertising – was via the post person. Indeed Canada Post has long depended on this – generally unwanted – mail. You may remember in May, in one of the saddest public campaigns ever launched, Canada Post tried persuading Canadians that Junk mail was good for them.

One of the big advantages of junk mail is, however fleeting, it ended up in your home. Shift delivery to a mailbox out of the house however and you get this:

mailbox mess

Toronto Star File Photo

So there are two implications of the change. The first, as the photo above testifies, is that some – maybe even many advertisers, will feel like their mailers are less effective. They will of course actually know this, since the ROI on mailers is a pretty exact, and measured, science.

The second is that the largest player in the delivery of pulp to peoples homes business will have retreated away from… the home. Leaving a big demand to be filled by new entrants.

Thus, it is quite conceivable that Canada Post may see its junk mail volumes decline faster still. However, I suspect that while mail will decline, unaddressed mail – what you and I think of as flyers – could increase. These flyers, delivered by private players, have the enormous benefit of going right to your front door, just like good old junk mail did. Oh, and deliverers of these flyers don’t have pesky policies that stop them from delivering items to houses with signs that say “no junk mail.”

What does that mean? Well hopefully, in the long term, junk mail proves less and less effective a means of selling things. But I suspect that there will always be an advantage to shoveling 30 flyers a week onto your front stoop. So I can imagine another long term trend. In 2010 the government passed anti-spam legislation that focused on, the digital form of spam. So while I’m quite confident this law will have close to zero impact on digital spammers, for a growing number of Canadians I suspect there is little difference between online and offline spam in their mind. So much so that, it would not surprise me if an uptick in unsolicited flyers and mailers to people’s door – where they no longer get actual mail – make real anti-spam legislation a political winner. Indeed, a clever opposition party, wanting to show the more ill-conceived elements of the government’s plan, burnish its environmental credentials and own the idea early, might even propose it.

Will we get there? I don’t know. But if we just unleashed a wave of new spam and flyers on Canadians, I hope some new tool emerges that allows Canadians to say no to unsolicited junk.

Canada Post and the War on Open Data, Innovation & Common Sense (continued, sadly)

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Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog post on Canada Post’s War on the 21st Century, Innovation & Productivity. In it I highlighted how Canada Post launched a lawsuit against a company – Geocoder.ca – that recreates the postal code database via crowdsourcing. Canada Posts case was never strong, but then, that was not their goal. As a large, tax payer backed company the point wasn’t to be right, it was to use the law as a way to financial bankrupt a small innovator.

This case matters – especially to small start ups and non-profits. Open North – a non-profit on which I sit on the board of directors – recently explored what it would cost to use Canada Posts postal code data base on represent.opennorth.ca, a website that helps identify elected officials who serve a given address. The cost? $9,000 a year, nothing near what it could afford.

But that’s not it. There are several non-profits that use Represent to help inform donors and other users of their website about which elected officials represent geographies where they advocate for change. The licensing cost if you include all of these non-profits and academic groups? $50,000 a year.

This is not a trivial sum, and it is very significant for non-profits and academics. It is also a window into why Canada Post is trying to sue Geocoder.ca – which offers a version of its database for… free. That a private company can offers a similar service at a fraction of the cost (or for nothing) is, of couse, a threat.

Sadly, I wish I could report good news on the one year anniversary of the case. Indeed, I should be!

This is because what should have been the most important development was how the Federal Court of Appeal made it even more clear that data cannot be copyrighted. This probably made it Canada Post’s lawyers that they were not going to win and made it even more obvious to us in the public that the lawsuit against geocoder.ca – which has not been dropped-  was completely frivolous.

Sadly, Canada Post reaction to this erosion of its position was not to back off, but to double down. Recognizing that they likely won’t win a copyright case over postal code data, they have decided:

a) to assert that they hold trademark on the words ‘postal code’

b) to name Ervin Ruci – the opertator of Geocoder.ca – as a defendent in the case, as opposed to just his company.

The second part shows just how vindictive Canada Post’s lawyers are, and reveals the true nature of this lawsuit. This is not about protecting trademark. This is about sending a message about legal costs and fees. This is a predatory lawsuit, funded by you, the tax payer.

But part a is also sad. Having seen the writing on the wall around its capacity to win the case around data, Canada Post is suddenly decided – 88 years after it first started using “Postal Zones” and 43 years after it started using “Postal Codes” to assert a trade mark on the term? (You can read more on the history of postal codes in canada here).

Moreover the legal implications if Canada Post actually won the case would be fascinating. It is unclear that anyone would be allowed to solicit anybody’s postal code – at least if they mentioned the term “postal code” – on any form or website without Canada Posts express permission. It leads one to ask. Does the federal government have Canada Post’s express permission to solicit postal code information on tax forms? On Passport renewal forms? On any form they have ever published? Because if not, they are, I understand Canada Posts claim correctly, in violation of Canada Post trademark.

Given the current government’s goal to increase the use of government data and spur innovation, will they finally intervene in what is an absurd case that Canada Post cannot win, that is using tax payer dollars to snuff out innovators, increases the costs of academics to do geospatial oriented social research and that creates a great deal of uncertainty about how anyone online be they non-profits, companies, academics, or governments, can use postal codes.

I know of no other country in the world that has to deal with this kind of behaviour from their postal service. The United Kingdom compelled its postal service to make postal code information public years ago.In Canada, we handle the same situation by letting a tax payer subsidized monopoly hire expensive lawyers to launch frivolous lawsuits against innovators who are not breaking the law.

That is pretty telling.

You can read more about this this, and see the legal documents on Ervin Ruci’s blog.  has also done a good job covering this story at canada.com.

Open Postal Codes: A Public Response to Canada Post on how they undermine the public good

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Earlier this week the Ottawa Citizen ran a story in which I’m quoted about a fight between Treasury Board and Canada Post officials over making postal code data open. Treasury Board officials would love to add it to data.gc.ca while Canada post officials are, to put it mildly, deeply opposed.

This is of course, unsurprising since Canada Post recently launched a frivolous law suit against a software developer who is – quite legally – recreating the postal code data set. For those new to this issue I blogged about this, why postal codes matter and cover the weakness (and incompetence) of Canada Post’s legal case here.

But this new Ottawa Citizen story had me rolling my eyes anew – especially after reading the quotes and text from Canada Post spokesperson. This is in no way an attack on the spokesperson, who I’m sure is a nice person. It is an attack on their employer whose position, sadly, is not just in opposition to the public interest because of the outcome in generates but because of the way it treats citizens. Let me break down Canada Posts platform of ignorance public statement line by line, in order to spell out how they are undermining both the public interest, public debate and accountability.

Keeping the information up-to-date is one of the main reasons why Canada Post needs to charge for it, said Anick Losier, a spokeswoman for the crown corporation, in an interview earlier this year. There are more than 250,000 new addresses and more than a million address changes every year and they need the revenue generated from selling the data to help keep the information up-to-date.

So what is interesting about this is that – as far as I understand – it is not Canada Post that actually generates most of this data. It is local governments that are responsible for creating address data and, ironically, they are required to share it for free with Canada Post. So Canada Post’s data set is itself built on data that it receives for free. It would be interesting for cities to suddenly claim that they needed to engage in “cost-recovery” as well and start charging Canada Post. At some point you recognize that a public asset is a public asset and that it is best leveraged when widely adopted – something Canada Post’s “cost-recovery” prevents. Indeed, what Canada Post is essentially saying is that it is okay for it to leverage the work of other governments for free, but it isn’t okay for the public to leverage its works for free. Ah, the irony.

“We need to ensure accuracy of the data just because if the data’s inaccurate it comes into the system and it adds more costs,” she said.

“We all want to make sure these addresses are maintained.”

So, of course, do I. That said, the statement makes it sound like there is a gap between Canada Post – which is interested in the accuracy of the data – and everyone else – who isn’t. I can tell you, as someone who has engaged with non-profits and companies that make use of public data, no one is more concerned about accuracy of data than those who reuse it. That’s because when you make use of public data and share the results with the public or customers, they blame you, not the government source from which you got the data, for any problems or mistakes. So invariable one thing that happens when you make data open is that you actually have more stakeholders with strong interests in ensuring the data is accurate.

But there is also something subtly misleading about Canada Posts statement. At the moment, the only reason there is inaccurate data out there is because people are trying to find cheaper ways of creating the postal code data set and so are willing to tolerate less accurate data in order to not have to pay Canada Post. If (and that is a big if) Canada Post’s main concern was accuracy, then making the data open would be the best protection as it would eliminate less accurate version of postal code data. Indeed, this suggests a failure of understanding economics. Canada states that other parts of its business become more expensive when postal code data is inaccurate. That would suggest that providing free data might help reduce those costs – incenting people to create inaccurate postal code data by charging for it may be hurting Canada Post more than any else. But we can’t assess that, for reason I outline below. And ultimately, I suspect Canada Post’s main interest in not accuracy – it is cost recovery – but that doesn’t sound nearly as good as talking about accuracy or quality, so they try to shoe horn those ideas into their argument.

She said the data are sold on a “cost-recovery” basis but declined to make available the amount of revenue it brings in or the amount of money it costs the Crown corporation to maintain the data.

This is my favourite part. Basically, a crown corporation, whose assets belong to the public, won’t reveal the cost of a process over which it has a monopoly. Let’s be really clear. This is not like other parts of their business where there are competative risk in releasing information – Canada Post is a monopoly provider. Instead, we are being patronized and essentially asked to buzz off. There is no accountability and there is no reasons why they could give us these numbers. Indeed, the total disdain for the public is so appalling it reminds me of why I opt out of junk mail and moved my bills to email and auto-pay ages ago.

This matters because the “cost-recovery” issue goes to the heart of the debate. As I noted above, Canada Post gets the underlying address data for free. That said, there is no doubt that it then creates some value to the data by adding postal codes. The question is, should that value best be recouped through cost-recovery at this point in the value chain, or at later stages through additional economy activity (and this greater tax revenue). This debate would be easier to have if we knew the scope of the costs. Does creating postal code data cost Canada Post $100,000 a year? A million? 10 million? We don’t know and they won’t tell us. There are real economic benefits to be had in a digital economy where postal code data is open, but Canada Post prevents us from having a meaningful debate since we can’t find out the tradeoffs.

In addition, it also means that we can’t assess if their are disruptive ways in which postal code data could be generated vastly more efficiently. Canada Post has no incentive (quite the opposite actually) to generate this data more efficiently and there for make the “cost-recovery” much, much lower. It may be that creating postal code data really is a $100,000 a year problem, with the right person and software working on it.

So in the end, a government owned Crown Corporation refuses to not only do something that might help spur Canada’s digital economy – make postal code data open – it refuses to even engage in a legitimate public policy debate. For an organization that is fighting to find its way in the 21st century it is a pretty ominous sign.

* As an aside, in the Citizen article it says that I’m an open government activist who is working with the federal government on the website’s development. The first part – on activism – is true. The latter half, that I work on the open government website’s development, is not. The confusion may arise from the fact that I sit on the Treasury Board’s Open Government Advisory Panel, for which I’m not paid, but am asked for feedback, criticism and suggestions – like making postal code data open – about the government’s open government and open data initiatives.

Canada Post’s War on the 21st Century, Innovation & Productivity

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The other week Canada Post announced it was suing Geocoder.ca – an alternative provider of postal code data. It’s a depressing statement on the status of the digital economy in Canada for a variety of reasons. The three that stand out are:

1) The Canadian Government has launched an open government initiative which includes a strong emphasis on open data and innovation. Guess which data set is the most requested data set by the public: Postal Code data.

2) This case risks calling into question the government’s commitment to (and understanding of) digital innovation, and

3) it is an indication – given the flimsiness of the case – of how little crown corporations understand the law (or worse, how willing they are to use the taxpayer funded litigation to bully others irrespective of the law).

Let me break down the situation into three parts. 1) Why this case matters to the digital economy (and why you should care), 2) Why the case is flimsy (and a ton of depressingly hilariously facts) and 3) What the Government could be doing about, but isn’t.

Why this case matters.

So… funny thing the humble postal code. One would have thought that, in a digital era, the lowly postal code would have lost its meaning.

The interesting truth however, is that the lowly postal code has, in many ways, never been more important. For better for worse, postal codes have become a core piece of data for both the analog and especially digital economy. These simple, easy to remember, six digit numbers, allow you to let a company, political party, or non-profit to figure out what neighborhood, MP riding or city you are in. And once we know where you are, there are all sorts of services the internet can offer you: is that game you wanted available anywhere near you? Who are your elected representatives (and how did they vote on that bill)? What social services are near you? Postal codes, quite simply, one of the easiest ways for us to identify where we are, so that governments, companies and others can better serve us. For example, after to speaking to Geocoder.ca founder Ervin Ruci, it turns out that federal government ministries are a major client of his, dozens of different departments using his service including… the Ministry of Justice.

Given how important postal code data is given it can enable companies, non-profits and government’s to be more efficient and productive (and thus competitive), one would think government would want to make it as widely available as possible. This is, of course, what several governments do.

But not Canada. Here postal code data is managed by Canada Post, which charges, I’m told, between $5,000-$50,000 dollars for access to the postal code database (depending on what you want). This means, in theory, every business (or government entity at the local, provincial or federal level) in Canada that wants to use postal code information to figure out where its customers are located must pay this fee, which, of course, it passes along to its customers. Worse, for others the fee is simple not affordable. For non-profits, charities and, of course, small businesses and start-ups, they either choose to be less efficient, or test their business model in a jurisdiction where this type of data is easier to access.

Why this case is flimsy

Of course, because postal codes are so important, Geocoder came up with an innovative solution to the problem. Rather than copy Canada Post’s postal code data base (which would have violated Canada Post’s terms of use) they did something ingenious… they got lots of people to help them manually recreate the data set. (There is a brief description of how here) As the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) brilliant argues in their defense of Geocoder: “The Copyright Act confers on copyright owners only limited rights in respect of particular works: it confers no monopoly on classes of works (only limited rights in respect of specific original works of authorship), nor any protection against independent creation. The Plaintiff (Canada Post) improperly seeks to use the Copyright Act to craft patent-like rights against competition from independently created postal code databases.”

And, of course, there are even deeper problems with Canada Post’s claims:

The first is that an address – including the postal code – is a fact. And facts cannot be copyrighted. And, of course, if Canada Post won, we’d all be hooped since writing a postal code down on say… an envelop, would violate Canada Post’s copyright.

The second, was pointed out to me by a mail list contributor who happened to work for a city. He pointed out that it is local governments that frequently create the address data and then share it with Canada Post. Can you imagine if cities tried to copyright their address data? The claim is laughable. Canada post claims that it must charge for the data to recoup the cost of creating it, but the data it gets from cities it gets for free – the creation of postal code data should not be an expensive proposition.

But most importantly… NON OF THIS SHOULD MATTER. In a world of where our government is pushing an open data strategy, the economic merits of making one of the most important open data sets public, should stand on their own without the fact that the law is on our side.

There is also a bonus 4th element which makes for fun reading in the CIPPIC defense that James McKinney pointed out:

“Contrary to the Plaintiff’s (Canada Post’s) assertion at paragraph 11 of the Statement of Claim that ‘Her Majesty’s copyright to the CPC Database was transferred to Canada Post’ under section 63 of the Canada Post Corporation, no section 63 of the current Canada Post Corporation Act  even exists. Neither does the Act that came into force in 1981 transfer such title.”

You can read the Canada Post Act on the Ministry of Justice’s website here and – as everyone except, apparently, Canada Post’s lawyers has observed – it has only 62 sections.

What Can Be Done.

Speaking of The Canada Post Act, while there is no section 63, there is a section 22, which appears under the header “Directives” and, intriguingly, reads:

22. (1) In the exercise of its powers and the performance of its duties, the Corporation shall comply with such directives as the Minister may give to it.

In other words… the government can compel Canada Post to make its Postal Code data open. Sections 22 (3), (4) and (5) suggest that the government may have to compensate Canada Post for the cost of implementing such a directive, but it is not clear that it must do so. Besides, it will be interesting to see how much money is actually at stake. As an aside, if Canada were to explore privatizing Canada Post, separating out the postal code function and folding it back into government would be a logical decision since you would want all players in the space (a private Canada Post, FedEx, Puralator, etc…) to all be able to use a single postal code system.

Either way, the government cannot claim that Canada Post’s crown corporation status prevents it from compelling the organization to apply an open license to its postal code data. The law is very clear that it can.

What appears to be increasingly obvious is that the era of closed postal code data will be coming to an end. It may be in a slow, expensive and wasteful lawsuit that costs both Canada Post, Canadian taxpayers and CIPPIC resources and energy they can ill afford, or it can come quickly through a Ministerial directive.

Let’s hope that latter prevails.

Indeed, the postal code has arguably become the system for physical organizing our society. Everything from the census to urban planning to figuring out where to build a Tim Horton’s or Starbucks will often use postal code data as the way to organize data about who we are and where we live. Indeed it is the humble postal code that frequently allows all these organizations – from governments to non-profits to companies – to be efficient about locating people and allocating resources. Oh. And it also really helps for shipping stuff quickly that you bought online.

It would be nice to live in a country that really understood how to support a digital economy. Sadly, last week, I was once again reminded of how frustrating it is to try to be 21st century company in Canada.

What happened?

Directives
  • 22. (1) In the exercise of its powers and the performance of its duties, the Corporation shall comply with such directives as the Minister may give to it.

Why is Finding a Post Box so Hard?

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Sometimes it is the small things that show how government just gets it all so wrong.

Last Thursday The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac has a little bit on the US Post Office and its declining fortunes as people move away from mail. There is no doubt that the post offices days are numbered, but that doesn’t mean the decline has to be as steep as it is. Besides there are things they could be doing to make life a little easier to use them (and god knows they should be doing anything they can, to be more appealing).

Take, for example, the humble post office box. They can be frustratingly hard to locate. Consider Broadway and Cambie – one of the busiest intersections in Vancouver – and yet there is no post box at the intersection. (I eventually found it one block east on broadway) but I carried around a letter for 3 weeks before I eventually found one.

In short why is there not digital map (or for techies, and API) for post box locations? I could imagine all sorts of people that might make use of it. Would it be nice to just find out – where is the closest post box to where I’m standing? More importantly, it might actually help the post office attract a few extra customers. It certainly wouldn’t hurt customer service. I’ve wondered for a couple of years why it doesn’t publish this data set.

Turns out I’m not the only with this frustration. My friend Steven Tannock has channeled his frustration into a simple app called Wherepost.ca. It’s a simple website – optimized for mobile phone use – that allows users to add post boxes as well as find the one nearest to them. In short, Steven’s trying to create a public data set of post box locations by crowd sourcing the problem. If Canada Post won’t be helpful… we’ll help one another.

Launched on Thursday with 20 post office box locations, there are now over 400 boxes mapped (mostly in the Vancouver area) with several dozen users contributing. In addition, Steven tells me users in at least 2 other countries have asked for new icons so they can add post boxes where they live. It seems Canadians aren’t the only ones frustrated about not knowing where the nearest post box is.

The ideal, of course, would be for Canada Post to publish an API of all post box locations. I suspect however, that they either don’t actually know where they all are in a digital form (at which point they should really help Steven as he is doing them a huge service) or revealing their location will be seeing as sacrificing some important IP that people should pay for. Remember, this is an organization that refuses to make Postal Code data open, a critical data set for companies, non-profits and governments.

This isn’t the worlds fanciest app but its simplicity is what makes it so great, and so useful. Check it out at WherePost.ca and… of course, add a post box if you see one.

 

 

Two Questions on Canadian Postal Codes

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I find it interesting that Postal Codes in Canada are not freely available. No our postal service charges a nasty license fee to get them. This means that people who want to explore creating interest apps that might use postal codes to locate services… don’t. As one would expect, zip codes in the US are freely available for anyone to hack with (this great blog post really shows you all the options).

So, two questions.

First, with all the fuss the competition bureau has kicked up around the MLS data – are Canadian postal codes being used to extend the monopoly of Canada Post? Shouldn’t this be data that, if shared, would improve competition? (Let’s forget the fact that Canadian tax dollars created the Post Office and that it might be nice if Canadian citizens could freely use the capital created with their tax dollars to generate further innovation (like the US counterparts can). Sadly, UK citizens are stuck with the same terrible boat as us.

Second, I’d heard rumours that someone was trying to crowd source the location of postal codes in the UK, essentially asking people to simply type in their address and postal in a website to create a parallel dataset. I was wondering if that might be legal here or if Canada Post would launch a legal battle against it. Can you prevent someone from recreating (not copying) at data set like this? My assumption is no…

Either way, it would be nice if Canada Post joined the rest of North America and made this information freely available. It would certainly generate far more new businesses, innovations and efficiencies that would generate further tax dollars for the government and productivity for the Canadian economy… but then, the Post Office would lose a few dollars in revenue. Sigh.