Small business owners lament holiday losses over Canada Post strike

Canada Post resuming services How did small businesses handle the Canada Post strike? CTV London's Bryan Bicknell investigates.

Small business owners that rely on Canada Post to serve customers are hoping for a Santa miracle this holiday season. It comes as service resumes at the crown corporation after a month-long strike.

“This is the longest period that we’ve ever had any kind of disruption like this that’s caused this much chaos in our holiday, for sure,” said Ryan Schroeyens, who’s known as the head guru at Music City, London Guitar Shoppe in east London.

The family-owned business, now in its second generation, has been involved with e-commerce for more than a decade. It sells audio gear, musical instruments and more, both online and from its showroom on Charterhouse Crescent. But now they find themselves in catch-up mode, getting merchandise packed and parceled and out the door as quickly as they can.

“We service nationwide, right, we’re over 50,000 customers a month. And so, we have customers that live in all kinds of rural areas where a P.O. box is the only way they can get packages for Christmas,” explained Schroeyens.

He said they also use private couriers. However, they too are backed-up, overwhelmed because of the Canada Post strike.

“Certain packages will sit for weeks and there’s no recourse. Even some of the biggest suppliers we deal with have shipments inbound to us that have been sitting for over a week,” he said.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, as many as three quarters of small businesses still use Canada Post for some services. In all, small business owners lost $1.6 billion because of the strike, said CFIB VP of Legislative Affairs for Ontario Ryan Mallough.

“It’s significant. It’s not just retailers sending packages through the mail. We heard from a manufacturer, for example, who had about a quarter million dollars in invoicing that was being held up and was worried about how they were going to pay their employees. Canada Post is still a service that a lot of small business owners rely on, and to miss out on it for a month was costly,” said Mallough.

In the meantime, Music City has hundreds of boxes of professional audio equipment and musical instruments packaged and ready to go.

Shroeyenes is hoping to have gifts under the tree for Christmas Day, but at this point there’s no guarantee.

“I think if they hustle, and they try to get through as much backlog this week as they can, but there’s some people that just straight-up aren’t going to get those boxes,” said Schroeyens.