Canada Post handed almost $31 million in bonus payments to its management staff last year, even as the Crown corporation posted its worst financial results on record, newly released documents show.
According to a disclosure filed with the House of Commons government operations and estimates committee, the postal service paid out $30.8 million in what it calls “at-risk payments for the management employee group” in 2025. The corporation says it currently employs 2,377 people in management roles nationwide, of whom 417 sit at the executive level.
Canada Post maintains the payout is modest in the context of its overall payroll, describing it as representing less than one percent of total annual labour costs. The corporation was also careful to note where the money came from.
“These payments are part of an existing compensation program and are funded from Canada Post’s own revenues, not the repayable government bridge funding we’ve received,” the corporation wrote in its submission to the committee.
The disclosure also framed the bonuses as one piece of a broader trade-off management has absorbed in recent years. Canada Post pointed to the loss of guaranteed pensions, more than ten years without an increase to salary bands, and repeated rounds of layoffs aimed at trimming management overhead. Those cost-cutting measures, the corporation argued, have come at a price of their own, driving experienced staff to leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere in government and the private sector.
The bonus disclosure lands just months after Canada Post reported a staggering pre-tax loss of $1.57 billion for 2025 a record shortfall for the organization.
CEO Doug Ettinger attributed much of that loss to instability stemming from labour disruptions when he appeared before a parliamentary committee on June 18. He suggested the figure overstated the corporation’s underlying troubles, telling MPs the “real deficit” was closer to $1 billion once one-time factors were stripped out.
Financially, Canada Post has been kept afloat largely through federal intervention. Ottawa provided a $1.03 billion cash injection last year, but that funding wasn’t enough to carry the corporation past early February 2026. The government then stepped in again with a $1.01 billion repayable loan to help cover the operating shortfall, followed by up to $673 million more in May to extend Canada Post’s runway through next March.
That latest funding arrived only weeks before Canada Post disclosed a further pre-tax loss of $205 million for the first quarter of 2026.
Appearing before the government operations committee last month, Ettinger defended the $30.8 million in payouts, noting that executive ranks have already been cut by 10 percent. He told MPs that the corporation’s broader “team incentive” a separate program tied to overall performance hasn’t paid out since 2011, and that the at-risk pay in question is a routine part of compensation for roughly 7,000 employees across the organization.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which filed an access-to-information request for the 2025 bonus figures back in February, put the average individual payout at roughly $13,000 for executives and managers combined. In a statement issued July 14, the group said Canada Post refused to break out how much specifically went to executives, instead folding those amounts into the broader management total.
Ettinger did not share those separated figures during his committee appearance but told Conservative MP Andrew Lawton he would provide them upon request.
Ettinger acknowledged that Canada Post’s finances remain unsettled as the corporation pursues deeper cost cuts, with an ultimate goal of reaching a break-even position within five years.
Late last year, the federal government introduced a package of reforms intended to slow the corporation’s mounting losses amid a long-term decline in mail volumes. As part of that push, Canada Post announced in April that it had begun preliminary planning to shift roughly four million addresses from door-to-door delivery to community mailboxes a change expected to save the corporation $400 million a year once fully rolled out over five years.
The corporation is also reassessing its retail footprint, with closures expected at urban and suburban post offices it considers over-served relative to demand. Canada Post has not released a specific dollar estimate for how much those closures alone will save, but officials describe the move as one component of a wider strategy, developed jointly with the federal government, to address the roughly $10 million the corporation is losing every day.
