Canada Post begs Iqaluit residents to pick up parcels
Online orders overwhelming warehouse
OTTAWA • At least once a week, Iqaluit Mayor Kenny Bell heads down to the city’s only Canada Post office to pick up multiple online orders generally filled with everyday essentials. There, he generally waits around 40 minutes in line to be able to access his mailbox and grab his parcel slip.
Then, he trudges 10 minutes to Canada Post’s parcel warehouse — a bare- bones building rented by the Crown corporation a few years ago to handle the overflow of parcels that is constantly growing — and waits another 40 minutes in line before he can hand his slip over to the postal worker and claim his packages.
After roughly 1 hour and a half, he gets to leave with his orders. An experience he, and hundreds of other Iqaluit residents, will repeat again in a few days.
“You can’t just come back later hoping that the line will have disappeared, because it’s always like this,” Bell said in an interview.
Canada Post’s office has been quite literally flooded with packages since the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s creating significant problems for both the crown corporation and Nunavummiut.
“This is an overwhelming situation for our staff and customers alike,” Canada Post spokesperson Hayley Magermans admitted in an email.
In Iqaluit, where the cheapest pack of 12 water bottles can cost $ 44 and the average box of Tide Pods laundry detergent is $ 55 at the grocery store, residents have turned en masse to online shopping. King among them is all is Amazon, one of the few merchants to offer free shipping to the Nordic city.
That shift to online shopping was further accelerated with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the fear of catching and spreading the virus was particularly strong in Nunavut, Bell says.
So a post office that was already struggling to deal with the daily influx of parcels was suddenly flooded with sometimes over 1,000 packages a day, according to the president of the local postmasters union, Xan Moffatt-toews.
Pictures she took before the pandemic in July 2019 show a warehouse so full of parcels that staff had to pile boxes onto pallets in the middle of the room while they waited to be claimed.
Elsewhere in the room, envelopes containing small items generally sent from wholesale websites are hastily piled into large seethrough bags to make more space.
“Christmas basically started in December and hasn’t stopped for 10 months. That’s the kind of volumes we’re dealing with because of the pandemic,” said the president of the Alberta, Northwest Territories and Nunavut branch of the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association.
Canada Post corroborated that claim.
“While the Iqaluit Post Office has always been one of the busiest post offices in Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rise in e- commerce has increased parcel volumes beyond anything we could have anticipated, and this has underscored our capacity issues in Iqaluit,” Margermans explained.
To illustrate her point, the Canada Post spokesperson said that their Iqaluit employees processed 78 per cent more parcels in July 2020 compared to the same month in 2019. The following month, 52 per cent more parcels came through the office compared to the previous year.
The post office and warehouse are so regularly overwhelmed with packages that Canada Post has taken to regularly begging Nunavummiut on social media to come retrieve their orders, all the while extending their opening hours to make sure clients have time to come by.
But for Bell and Moffatt-toews, this situation is not unexpected, as Canada Post claims, nor is it new.
In fact, both the local union and municipal government have been pleading for years for Canada Post to get more space for mail and more staff to help sort and distribute it.
“I would say it is the worst it’s ever been. But it has been bad for a long time,” Moffatt-toews said. “A few years ago, Canada Post rented a house to store the overflow of packages around Christmas. There were parcels in kitchen sinks! I think the people there deserve better.”
“Being able to receive parcels is all the more crucial in Nunavut because a lot of the items they order are daily essentials.”
Bell says city council has been pressing Canada Post to improve service and storage at their Iqaluit facilities for nearly a decade, and their patience is now wearing extremely thin.
“Every day, we hear from residents about lost packages, and at least once a month, I personally received someone else’s mail,” Bell described. “Everyone is also just really tired of waiting in line. Canada Post has been promising change since I was on city council in 2012.”
On social media, city councillor Kyle Sheppard even encouraged Nunavummiut to write the CEO of Canada Post and share their frustration with him.
“The two Canada Post locations we have now are not working. It is woefully inconvenient and wait times are ridiculous. The local outlet is completely under- resourced. Imagine the current outdoor wait times in February, in the wind with - 50° temperatures. It can’t continue as it is,” Sheppard tweeted on July 23.
In response, Canada Post says they’re well aware of these issues and are actively working to find solutions, including bigger spaces to store parcels and hiring more staff.
“Even before this, we were and are today, exploring ways to reconfigure our post offices, hire more staff and review our overall logistics to meet the demand and city’s high rate of growth,” Magermans said in a statement.
“To process the increase in volumes, we regularly extend our customer parcel pick- up hours ... on weekdays and weekends at both our facilities. We also regularly remind customers to pick up their parcels as soon as they arrive. We are developing short and long- term solutions to manage the increased volumes and create a better experience for our customers and employees.”
But those are all words Bell has heard before, and little has changed since. And recent interactions between city hall staff and Canada Post have him feeling less and less optimistic that the situation will improve before the bitter winter cold settles in.
“This summer, Canada Post staff organized a call with my staff, and during that meeting, Canada Post blamed our citizens for the way they order. I’m actually glad I wasn’t on that call, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been pretty,” he said.