West Island municipalities join suit over mailboxes

Pointe-Claire, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Dorval and Kirkland are the latest local municipalities to join a federal lawsuit against Canada Post’s plan to eliminate home delivery by 2018.

Beaconsfield will be voting on whether or not to join the lawsuit at its council meeting June 15.

Last November, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers launched the federal lawsuit against Canada Post and support from Canadian municipalities is growing. Last month, the cities of Montreal, Longueuil, Laval and Westmount joined the lawsuit. Lawsuit or no lawsuit, Canada Post continues to install community mailboxes in the West Island.

Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough Mayor Jim Beis was on his way to work recently when he spotted a new community mailbox freshly installed just around the corner from his house.

“They are going ahead and installing boxes even after legal proceedings (opposing the plan) have been launched,” Beis said. “There was no real public consultation about the impact this would have on the elderly, security, traffic. And they are telling people they need to get a doctor’s note in order to continue to have mail delivered to the house. That’s absurd.

“It should have been a coordinated effort with the municipalities, but they (Canada Post) ignore us.”

West Island mayors and borough mayors, including Beis, Lachine borough Mayor Claude Dauphin and Kirkland Mayor Michel Gibson, have suggested a middle ground — cutting delivery from five days a week to two or three days a week — but their suggestions have fallen on deaf ears.

“Do these (community) boxes already exist? Yes, in newer developments where people moved in understanding the situation,” Beis said. “These new boxes are being installed in established neighbourhoods.”

Dorval was consulted on the location of the community boxes and its recommendations were respected by Canada Post, as were the location of the boxes in Kirkland, but both cities remained opposed to the plan.

“We (the West Island) are the first on the slaughtering block,” Gibson said. “We have seniors who cannot get to a community mailbox and there must be accommodations for these people. Our joining the lawsuit is one way to show we are opposed to the change and also to show our support for cities, like Montreal and Westmount and Montreal West, where available land for the mailboxes and traffic circulation are real issues.”

Kirkland already has 84 community mailboxes and Canada Post’s plan calls for an additional 123 boxes to be installed in the city’s eight districts. Gibson said keeping the boxes clean was a major concern, so Kirkland looked at how many of the 84 existing boxes had been tagged by graffiti. A list of the 20 defaced boxes was sent to Canada Post. One week later, the boxes were cleaned.

“So we want to sit down with (Canada Post) and sign an agreement, which would guarantee that the boxes be kept clean,” Gibson said.

Gibson acknowledged that a powerful Crown corporation like Canada Post will be hard to beat. He has already consulted three lawyers about the possibility of filing an injunction to stop the installation of boxes and was told the city did not have the legal power to do so.

He said the issue of home mail delivery might well become a federal election issue, but that the election was four months away and ground was already been broken to pour bases for new community boxes in Kirkland.

“I suppose we could put a (city) bulldozer in front of every new location for a community box, but we don’t have that much machinery in Kirkland,” he said.