“That was a spicy column,” the cashier at the grocery store said when I put down my gold-plated Peruvian blueberries. As I thanked her, the woman just leaving overheard.

“Is the paper still publishing? I didn’t read him last week,” she remarked, looking at “him.” So the cashier directed her to a pile of Lake Reports stacked beside the NY Times.

This is what happens when a community newspaper is widely distributed to everybody in town through the post office — and when the posties decide to stop working. Mayhem. Confusion. Gutted, empty columnists stripped of meaning.

Well, we’re back baby. Canada Post workers ended an across-the-board work stoppage and started rotating instead.

Obviously the dispute ain’t over. The union walked out last year (and was then locked out) after contract talks failed and back-to-work measures enacted. This time the job action erupted after a federal report suggested it’s time to end door-to-door mail delivery. The Crown corp, after all, is drowning in losses.

In NOTL personal delivery ended long ago. But that didn’t spare us from the strike. Slogans were taped on the door. Bags of mail went undelivered. The Lake Report undistributed.

Allow me to tell you a story.

Thirty-five years ago the boss asked me to dive into the future of the post office.

“I want a recommendation if it should be privatized,” Brian Mulroney said one day, as we met behind the gold curtains hanging around the House of Commons chamber. “If not, how do we make it work?”

In 1990 I was an MP and chairman of an influential all-party parliamentary committee. So, being a good little soldier, I started an investigation, called witnesses to testify, including government officials, major clients and union bosses, travelled the country and eventually issued a report.

Called “Moving the Mail,” it concluded that things were seriously messed up. Without reform the postal service would be gutted by email, lose billions and ultimately fail.

The union called me scum. The government sat on the recommendations — which included stopping the delivery of mail door-to-door and a move away from lettermail into the package business. That made sense. And, of course, now here we are.

The current plan is to end door-to-door mail delivery to four million addresses — but over 10 years. This is decades too late, and after Canada Post Corporation lost $5 billion in the past year and was bailed out with a $1 billion government loan.

Whatever employees think or want, the post office as we know it is pooched.

Sad. It was formed 16 years before Canada was even born as a country, and operated as a federal government department until 1981. Then it became a Crown corporation with the twin mandates of serving all Canadians, everywhere, and being financially self-sustaining.

But those goals are mutually exclusive. No organization can deliver stuff across a vast nation daily for pocket change, while operating thousands of vehicles, maintaining 5,755 locations and employing 70,000 people, mostly members of an elbows-up union. Without unaddressed ad mail (like this newspaper) things would be even more dire.

Canada Post Corporation is a zombie outfit. The walking dead. It cannot survive in its present form unless the Carney government gives in — like the Mulroney outfit did — and continues to shovel public money into the furnace.

The annual deficit number could be $100 billion when the first Carney federal budget drops on Nov. 3. Much of that would be borrowed for “nation-building” infrastructure projects to lessen our dependency on you-know-who.

Mines. Ports. Reactors. Maybe a pipeline. Subs, planes and guns. Big, expensive stuff. And, if it is to survive, more bailouts for the postal service.

Urbanites may not get this, but in much of Canada, the post office is Canada. The sole, identifiable, enduring and working link to the federal government. Once that is shuttered, the bond dies. Social media wins. There will be consequences.

Carney says the budget will have two goals. Investment and austerity. The posties must already sense they’ll be on the wrong side of that trade.

Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca