Canada Post calls in RCMP over loo ‘art’
Handwriting expert hired to analyze derogatory graffiti about Crown Corp.
OCT. 28, 1987
Canada Post hired an RCMP handwriting expert to investigate graffiti in an employee washroom.
A local union official disputed it was graffiti, calling the washroom decorations “art.”
“It’s just a ludicrous waste of money,” Brett Donaldson, president of the Edmonton local of the Letter Carriers Union of Canada, told the Journal.
“Certainly, washroom graffiti is not just a disease limited to the post office.”
Besides, most graffiti in Edmonton postal employee washrooms is “well-thought-out stuff and I think some of it is art,” Donaldson added.
Canada Post spokesman Bob McRory said the particular graffiti that was investigated “was anything but art.”
McRory refused to reveal what the graffiti said.
But he said the investigation was limited to one statement written on a washroom wall at a south-side sub-postal station.
The washroom message was “one we cannot accept” because it was “derogatory to Canada Post and certain individuals in it.”
One letter carrier was temporarily suspended over the incident, McRory said.
The cost of the handwriting expert from K-Division wasn’t being released because “it’s an internal matter.”
Donaldson said the union had filed a contract grievance over the 15-day suspension on the grounds it was “balderdash.”
The suspension was part of “a discipline binge” Canada Post had been on since letter carriers went on a series of rotating strikes earlier in the summer, the union leader said.
“I obviously haven’t been in any women’s washrooms in my jurisdiction, but I’ve been in all the men’s washrooms and they’ve all got graffiti,” he said.
While some of the graffiti was derogatory to Canada Post or some of its managers, “most of the stuff is absolutely hilarious,” he said, although most of it was “unprintable.”
Some of it referred to Canada Post as a “clown corporation” or joked about the federal Tories and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, he said.
The majority of it was about particular individuals working for the Crown corporation and was only funny if you know the individuals, Donaldson said.
One local manager became such a well-known target for graffiti that the union president said he had found writing about the manager in a campground washroom near Winnipeg two years earlier.