Canada Post has begun transitioning the last homes that still receive home delivery to community mailboxes as part of a broader effort to return the Crown corporation to fiscal balance.

During the corporation’s annual public meeting on Thursday, Canada Post released 2025 financials and outlined its plans to overhaul the mail delivery service. It came roughly a year after the Carney government approved ending door-to-door delivery and ended the moratorium on closing post offices in rural and remote communities.

There are roughly 4 million addresses that still receive doorstep service. Canada Post is planning on moving 620,000 addresses to community mailboxes over the next several months, and the remainder by 2031.

Communities in Winnipeg and Quebec City are the first to start the transition, and the move will save the corporation around $500 million, according to Jon Hamilton, Canada Post’s vice-president of communications and stakeholder engagement.

The corporation said it lost $1.57 billion in 2025, up from $1.3 billion in 2024. It has lost $482 million in the fist half of 2026, $34 million more than the same period in 2025. Canada Post has recorded roughly $7 billion in losses since 2018.

Coupled with plans to close under-utilized post offices, Hamilton said the transition away from doorstep deliver will help Canada Post return to balance, but the company also needs to grow its share of the thriving parcel market.

“At Canada Post, we’ve been proud of our mandate that is serve all Canadians and do so on a self sustaining basis. The last few years, the bottom’s fallen out of that, and we want to get back to that,” he said in an interview, noting the billions in funding injections from Ottawa need to be repaid as well.

“We got to get back to sustainability and then start paying back our debts. And that’s something we’re very much focused on.”

Despite the grim fiscal news, Hamilton said there are reasons for optimism.

He noted that there’s been a “bit of a renaissance” in direct mail business as companies are increasingly turning to delivering printed catalogues to help cut through a congested online marketplace.

Hamilton also expressed confidence that transitioning to community mailboxes could help with parcel deliveries. Homes with community boxes can securely receive smaller parcels because the slots are opened with a key.

As for the prospect of post office closures, Hamilton said the company is starting to conduct customer surveys in 850 mostly urban stores to determine their future, promising a deft hand when it comes to truly rural locations.

He called the existing network “overbuilt” in many urban areas, including in communities on the fringes of bigger cities that would have been classified as rural when the moratorium was introduced in the mid-1990s.

“If you just do a search for a Canada Post office, what comes up is almost like a map with the measles. There’s all these red dots. There’s a number of post offices within a short distance,” he said.

“We understand the importance of these post offices in the rural, remote [and] Indigenous communities, but we’re out of balance because we’re spread out all over the country.”