We have had a lock out of the postal workers here in Canada for about a week – preceded by a series of rolling local strikes. What the unions want of course is job security and to hold onto their pensions.

But the result appears to be that they have cut their own throat. The heart of their business is business mail – principally bills! What we have seen is a massive switch to online billing that is being made ever easier by the billing companies. (Globe and Mail)

Count Nicole Mackoway among the people who saw the strife at Canada Post as a good time to make a switch. Ms. Mackoway, a stylist based in Edmonton, decided to get rid of all her paper bills – two power bills, two credit card bills and three phone bills.

“I hate getting bills in the mail anyway – this way any mail that comes will be fun,” she said.

ING Direct, a bank that conducts its business by Internet or phone, had 350,000 customers switch to online banking in the past two weeks. Almost half of its 1.8 million Canadian customers now receive their banking statements exclusively online.

“The postal strike created a small catalyst at a time when it’s already easy to make a change to online,” said Peter Aceto, chief executive officer of ING Direct Canada. “Canada Post has gone from the thing we relied on most to communicate a few decades ago to becoming a smaller part of our lives.”

Canada Post will lose at least $2,352,000 a year in revenue from ING Direct on stamps alone, assuming the company sends each of those 350,000 people one letter a month at the commercial price of $0.56 a stamp.

It isn’t just banks that will save from the switch to online bills and statements.

At Shaw Communications Inc., a telecommunications company, about 70,000 people signed up for online billing in June.

“That’s probably 10 times more than we would normally see,” said Peter Bissonnette, Shaw’s president.

“Clearly the labour disruption has driven that behaviour,” he said. “We’re very pleased that customers are finding other ways to do their billing.”

Enmax Corporation, a Calgary-based utility, had 5,000 customers enroll in its online billing system – a “very dramatic increase,” spokesman Ian Todd wrote in an e-mail.

Soon, like the telephone the only mail we will get is junk mail. For the only calls I get these days are spam too.

In many countries the post office has been privatized. The call to privatize Canada Post will escalate.

The US Mail is not exempt from any of these pressures and surely the clock is ticking here too. (Link to an excellent article and infographic here)

The web takes no prisoners.