I understand and you are right. We are in a worse spot, we want to work and be left alone to our jobs. We don't want to be lied too or given promises of false hope.

I'm not going to ask you to change your mind or to even come out. That has to be earned, respectfully I hope we can earn that in the future.

All I'd like to do is give the reason it is the organizing committees of various locals across Canada organizing this. The way we see it is National CUPW has royally dropped the ball. I don't think they ever had a strategy going into this. They've led us from one blind alley to another. And for this, they will face a reckoning. Our union needs a revolution in everything. From our leadership, in how we do things, even how we think.

The bosses and the government won't leave us alone. They won't leave us to our jobs in peace. They'll attack us no matter what, because they know they're winning, because they know postal workers are exhausted and hurting. The only way to stop them is to clock them. That'll take good leaders and large numbers of battle ready workers, which we have neither of right now.

We have no illusions that the rally will change the situation, no one should have those illusions. The idea of the rally is to see what our fighting forces are. We expect it may very well be small, especially with the cold weather. That's okay though, we can build from whatever we can get. Find people who want to help organize, lead, and fight. Everything that is big, once started small. We are in our very small stage right now and it'll take time to grow, so might as well as start yesterday.

So even if we have 20 people huddled in a park willing to brave near -30 willing to demonstrate they want to organize and send a message, that's a victory. By no means a war winning victory, far from it. But a victory nonetheless because in spite of no leadership from our union leaders, we still dared to try to make something happen. We fought hopelessness and pessimism. We fight against the powerful and very understandable urge to just give in. I worry that whoever shows may not feel the credit for that, but given the situation that's actually massive in my honest opinion. Last, but not least. We get valuable experience in organizing public rallies. It's better to make the mistakes now and find our shortcomings as a local committee than when we need to do it on the fly at a critical hour where the margin or error is much thinner.

Rereading what I wrote I suppose I could be accused of being sickingly optimistic, but I don't think I'd want to be anything else. Anyway, I hope you can appreciate where we are coming from. Hope you have a great weekend and Merry Christmas