Canada Post adds weekend parcel delivery in Ottawa, Montreal

Canada Post has started delivering parcels to homes on weekends in Ottawa and Montreal and plans to add Toronto in late November, the Crown corporation said at its annual public meeting on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026.

The postal service said it plans to bring weekend delivery to other cities, including Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, next year, with a goal of reaching seven million households by the end of 2027, CBC News reported.

Chief executive Doug Ettinger told the meeting that Canada Post is showing “early signs” of financial recovery and is winning back part of the parcel market it lost after 2019, The Canadian Press reported. He pointed to shipping discounts for small businesses and a new online marketplace, Canada Shops, which is still being tested.

The finances remain weak. Canada Post lost $482 million before tax in the first half of 2026, and executives said they still expect to rely on federal loans to stay afloat, according to CBC News. The second-quarter pre-tax loss was $277 million, down from $407 million a year earlier, as parcel revenue rose 20.7 per cent and operating costs fell by $119 million.

“The continued reliance on government funding is not a long-term solution and we are committed to reduce the reliance on government support as quickly as we can,” chief financial officer Rindala El-Hage said.

Ettinger, who is due to step down at the end of his second term in March, said the corporation’s network of post offices in cities is “overbuilt” and must be scaled back. He said rural and remote service will continue. “We will not abandon the small communities that rely on us,” he said.

Canada Post also launched an online tool on Thursday that lets customers who still have door-to-door delivery enter their postal code to see when their area is scheduled to switch to a community mailbox. About four million addresses still get doorstep delivery, and the corporation plans to convert them within about five years. Roughly 700,000 more households from Halifax to Victoria are to move to community boxes by the end of 2027, CP reported, and the first conversions in more than a decade were completed in recent days in Winnipeg and Sept-Îles, Que.

Private couriers have offered weekend and evening delivery for years. Canada Post had said its previous collective agreement with letter carriers kept it from doing the same. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the corporation signed a new agreement in June that runs until 2030, after more than two years of labour disruption that included a month-long national strike in late 2024.

Between 2019 and 2023, Canada Post’s share of the parcel market fell to 29 per cent from 62 per cent, according to CP. A federal overhaul announced in September 2025 lifted a 2015 moratorium on new community mailboxes and ended a freeze on rural post office closures that had been in place since 1994.

Mail timing is in the news elsewhere this week. In Ottawa, the city clerk said nearly half of mail-in ballots for the municipal election missed the return deadline. People planning holiday shipments can check our guide to Canada Post Christmas mailing deadlines for 2026, and our earlier coverage of the labour talks explains how Canada Post reached a deal with its second-largest union.

Sources: Canada Post annual public meeting, via CBC News and The Canadian Press.

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