The review commission boasts of receiving, in the course of its inquiry, 1,084 letters from interested Canadians, in addition to 440 formal submissions and 1,116 phone calls, none, apparently, from anyone with the slightest understanding of prices, markets or any other of the rudiments of economics. Either that, or the commissioner chose to ignore them. The result is a shockingly shoddy piece of work: lazily reasoned, haphazardly documented and steeped in nostalgic reverence for the all-providing state.

Though many troubling issues confront the corporation, the review was sparked chiefly by complaints of unfair competition from its private-sector rivals in the courier industry. They charge, though no one has proved, that Canada Post cross-subsidizes its courier operations out of the profits earned on its monopoly in the delivery of ordinary letters: that is, under-charges in the first by over-charging in the second.

A good part of the reason the allegation remains unproved is, indeed, the corporation's monopoly status. Not only does Canada Post refuse to release detailed cost figures, in splendid contempt for democratic accountability, but it does not appear, as Radwanski notes, even to have any: not so far as that might extend to a proper assigning of fixed costs between its competitive and monopoly operations. This sort of cowboy accounting will be familiar to followers of Ontario Hydro, another tenant in the elephant's graveyard of state monopolies in Canada.

Not that the complaints of private couriers should be guiding public policy: business is always whining about something. But it's possible to resolve the cross-subsidization debate once and for all in a way that would also serve the best interests of the broader public, simply by removing the post office's monopoly over first-class mail: a monopoly that exists not by divine right or economic logic, but by federal statute. Whether or not Canada Post is cross- subsidizing now, it is a certainty it could not do so if forced to charge competitive prices in both markets.

Instead, Radwanski urges that Canada Post withdraw from competitive services, while retaining its letter monopoly intact. Rather than let everyone compete with everybody, under the Radwanski plan no one would compete with anyone. The enormous potential gains from competition in mail delivery, as outlined in the submission of the federal Competition Bureau, among others, are jettisoned in the service of building a better monopoly.

How could he have got it so wrong?

It's not for lack of evidence of Canada Post's poor performance, on which the report is clear-eyed enough. Over the years, the corporation has charged more and more to do less and less: though it costs almost twice as much to send a letter, after inflation, as it did in 1971, Canada Post's delivery standards have been so debased that a letter is now counted as "on-time" if it takes four days to get from Toronto to Montreal. By contrast, in Australia, a country with a similar excess of geography but no statutory letter monopoly, the standard is next-day delivery -- two days to distant areas.

Yet, incredibly, Randwanski blames the corporation's ills on the "commercial culture" that has allegedly prevailed since 1986, when it was ordered to earn a competitive rate of return. (It may be only coincidence that the party in government at the time was not the Liberals, but another leading brand.) Apparently, until then the post office was a model of public enterprise. In any case, if the pursuit of profit is the problem, the commissioner can relax: Canada Post wouldn't know a profit if it bit it in the leg. Since 1982, it has lost a total of $1.517-billion, and that on the post office's own reckoning.

Why so shy about competition? In part, the report reflects a naive understanding of the differences between private and public enterprise. "The internal culture of a public sector organization," it observes, "is appropriately focused on serving the public interest." Sound like any bureaucracy you know? On the other hand, "the culture of a private sector business is normally focused on competing as strongly as possible to maximize profits." Yet it is exactly the premise of a market economy that profit-maximizing firms can serve the public interest: not because they want to, but where the paying public has its choice of competing providers, because they have to.

There is, however, a more immediate reason why the report missed the competition boat. It is called the uniform postage rate, and it is to that subject we turn next.