The union would be in a legal position to strike as early as mid-August.   A strike is hardly a certainty, of course, but it wouldn't exactly be surprising, either. By my count, there have been 11 national postal strikes since 1967, when postal workers first won the right to strike: an average of one every two and two-thirds years. The last one, you'll recall, was in 1991 -- six years ago. So they're due. And just in case anyone thinks the posties have mellowed over the years, consider this: the union is demanding wage increases totalling 11.3 per cent over 18 months.

Not that many people would notice if they did go on strike. Much has changed since 1967, in no small part because of the irregularity of postal service. The courier business hardly existed then; today it is a $3-billion industry, with literally hundreds of competing firms. E-mail, electronic banking, telephone and airline deregulation, and of course the ubiquitous fax: these, too, have liberated many people from the tyranny of the mail monopoly.

Yet for those who wish to send a letter the old-fashioned way, the monopoly, mysteriously, remains. Canada Post is one of the last of the great state monopolies of the twentieth century, protected from competition not by a lack of rivals or its own magnificence but by statute. Section 14 of the 1981 Canada Post Act makes it a crime for anyone else to carry a letter for less than three times the regular postage rate. The punishment for violating Canada Post's "exclusive privilege" is up to five years in jail, the same as you would get if you sent a bomb through the mail.

Over the years, Canada has counted the cost of the monopoly in many ways.

Service has deteriorated steadily -- at one point as many as 20 per cent of all letters arrived late -- a trend disguised in recent years by the remarkable expedient of reclassifying late letters as "on time." Four days from Toronto to Montreal, for example, is now considered acceptable. Weekend service is but a distant memory, of course; in some parts of the country, so is home delivery.

Yet through it all the price of a stamp has chugged ever higher. At 45 cents, it now costs nearly twice as much to send a letter as it did in 1971, after inflation. Even that has not been enough to spare the taxpayer from the post office's horrendous losses: though these were supposed to cease after the service became a Crown corporation, even Canada Post concedes it has lost another $1.5-billion since 1982. Others, notably the firms with which it competes in the courier end of the business -- and who suspect it of subsidizing its courier service out of the profits on its first-class mail monopoly -- would suggest a much higher figure. But no one knows for sure, since Canada Post, remarkably enough, is not required to open its books to anyone -- not even the Auditor General.

Like the periodic threat of a postal strike, not one of these problems, which have consumed so much public debate over the years -- not the glacial pace of delivery, not the cuts in service, not the price of a stamp or the size of the losses -- would matter a whit were Canada Post not a publicly-owned, statutory monopoly. Yet whenever the subject comes up for review, no one seems able to make the mental leap to the obvious solution: abolish the monopoly. Let anyone carry a letter for any price they like, and watch competition drive costs down and service up.

(The objection is that a uniform postage rate would be impossible under competition; otherwise, profit-seeking firms would "cream off" the low-cost urban routes and leave high-cost rural routes unserved. But why should it always cost the same to send a letter, whether across town or across the country? In no other sector of the economy are we enjoined to ignore production costs in this fashion.)

Even the prime victims of the monopoly, small business, can suggest no better solution to the threat of a strike than to declare the mail to be an "essential service," thereby depriving postal workers of the right to strike.

Whatever it is that postal workers do with their time, it is neither essential nor, for the most part, a service. In any case, all that would be achieved by making strikes illegal would be a series of illegal strikes.   The point, surely, is not to make postal strikes illegal. It is to make them irrelevant. As, for a growing number of former postal consumers, they are.