BC FORUM News - from The Advocate, Winter 2015

Battle for door-to-door mail delivery is far from over

One week after the federal election, Canada Post announced it was “temporarily suspending” its elimination of door-to-door mail delivery.

In the hours before it made that announcement, it eliminated home delivery to hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

Canada Post CEO Deepak Chopra – who was given a five year contract extension by the Harper government in August – said the corporation couldn’t have paused its phaseout of home delivery any earlier without disrupting service.

“That’s a ridiculous assertion,” said Mike Palecek, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).

“It would have taken a phone call to tell people just keep delivering as normal. Instead they wanted to rush through the cuts,” said Palecek.

The union says Canada Post moved nearly 300,000 addresses to community mailboxes mere hours before it announced a halt in the program.

The Liberals promised in their election platform to “save home mail delivery” and review the operations of Canada Post.

However, it’s not clear whether the new federal government will restore door-to-door service to those who have lost it as demanded by the labour movement and many others.

“Canada Post needs to improve and expand its service to provide us with a modern post office,” said Marion Pollack, who represents CUPW on the BC FORUM board of directors.

“Canada Post has a delivery network in most communities and should be able to leverage that into providing new and innovative services,” she said.

For example, Pollack said, the post office could provide banking services in communities that currently have little access to banks, and even step in as an additional provider to promote lower rates for cell phone and wireless services.

La Poste in France is testing new roles for letter carriers, as daily visitors to the door, in promoting social cohesion, helping older residents to remain in their homes for as long as possible, and other public service objectives, said Pollack.

She urged everyone to ask their MP to push for restoration of home delivery, implementation of new services, and a public review of the future of Canada Post.

In the meantime, the anger at cuts in home delivery remains palpable. The Charlottetown Guardian editorialized that the timing of Canada Post’s moratorium was more than coincidence. “It came a day too late to save 10,000 households converted in Charlottetown and Stratford, and hundreds of thousands more across Canada.”

The newspaper thundered that the delay was a tactic designed to carry out the conversions in defiance of the new government.

“Such arrogance should only have one result,” it said. The prime minister “has little option left but to sack the current president, CEO and board. The argument whether community boxes is the right plan isn’t what’s at issue any more. It’s a Crown corporation openly defying the will of the Canadian people and its newly-elected government. A new Canada Post board must order a reversal (and) dump those unsightly boxes into the nearest recycling bin,” said the Guardian.