Postie’s choice: Canada Post either changes or dies
What is the future of Canada Post? The Crown corporation has been embroiled in a long-standing disagreement with its workers over wages and benefits. Canada Post claims it’s not making the money it once did. Much of its business has declined thanks to the digital revolution.
Canada Post wants to curtail or largely eliminate house-to-house delivery. Letter carriers will no longer trudge down the street serving every home. Instead, there will be community mail boxes. Customers will have to walk or drive to pick up their mail. This is what Canada Post wants and it has run into all types of criticism.
Letter carriers have established a special relationship with their customers. Sometimes they are bitten by dogs. But carriers are often the first to notice that some aged person is not answering his or her door or is looking ill and needs help.
There is one obvious fact: People today write very few letters. The Internet lines are busy with thousands of e-mails. Some people are so busy texting they do not look where they are walking or even driving. The results can be disastrous but this is the age of instant communication.
Some parents have left notes for their children and discovered that their kids cannot understand them because some schools no longer teach cursive. Letter writing seems to be an art form reserved for the older generation.
One suggestion is that post offices should once again offer a banking service. This makes a lot of sense. Banks have been closing branches and many communities are without what is very nearly an essential service. If private enterprise cannot do it, there’s no reason why a public service should not fill the void.
It should be noted that countless small towns have never had carrier service. Their post offices have become community gathering places where people meet to get their mail and exchange the latest gossip. Preserving rural post offices is just as important as saving home delivery and letter carriers’ jobs.
The post office needs to eliminate the lunacy of shipping letters from North Bay to be sorted in Toronto and then returned to this city.
Canada Post has many traditions worth saving, but it has to develop new ideas and new services if it’s going to survive.