From Buses to Banks: we should be using post offices as infrastructure

Most Canadians live in densely-populated urban or suburban areas with shops and transit within easy distances. But millions of us are residing in rural Canada, although the percentage varies greatly between provinces, territories, and Indigenous communities.

The crisis created by Greyhound’s recent withdrawal from rural areas shows that, while we are eager to showcase the magnificence of our nation’s remote and wilderness regions, the realities of living near them are too often overlooked or ignored.

One painful reality of rural life is that often the jobs to be had are precarious or seasonal. There is less access to education, which means that rural youth will often leave their communities to seek better opportunities elsewhere.

Canada’s rural communities thus end up in a death spiral of impoverishment, with aging and diminishing populations, shuttered businesses, and a shortage of skilled workers to support the local economy and essential services.

Having fewer jobs or services in your community means you must travel and the distances that need to be travelled in rural areas are daunting, costly to both the individual and the environment in terms of fuel, and sometimes very dangerous. For example, the lack of affordable transit between Prince George and Prince Rupert in B.C. clearly contributed to the infamous “Highway of Tears” where many Indigenous girls and women went missing or were murdered as they hitchhiked.

Last year, after over a decade of pressure from Northern Indigenous communities, BC Transit put a partially subsidized transit service in place, estimated to have been used by 5,000 people in its first year, but the service does not cover the entire stretch of highway. Along that same stretch of highway lie at least seven rural post offices which could offer safe and accessible options for transit hubs or at least function as social centres from which to organize ride sharing programs. Why haven’t we used them? Why shouldn’t we?

Rural areas need better infrastructure, period. This includes digital infrastructure in the form of broadband which connects people to the rest of the world, allows them to stay in their communities by accessing education and jobs there, and fosters new businesses and services. Many rural residents (even closer to town) still live in “blackout zones” on the wrong side of the “digital divide.”

The CRTC has declared broadband a basic service that should be available to all, regardless of their ability to pay, and the government’s Connect to Innovate program has pledged millions for internet in rural Canada pending funding proposals. But it is less clear how that utility can be delivered in an affordable way in Northern and remote areas. In some municipalities, public libraries offer hotspots for online access but in rural Canada, public libraries are not to be found everywhere. What can be found almost everywhere is a post office.

That post office, still the heart of its small community and often the sole government service in the area, could be supporting the “new pathways for social organization, economic development, and local capacity building” that are recommended by the CRRF. That is also the vision of the Delivering Community Power coalition, which sees Canada Post reinvented as a community hub, fostering innovation in alternative energy initiatives, showcasing local products, supporting local food, and offering financial inclusion through basic banking and remittance services. Add to that the idea of safe accessible transit hubs, for shuttles or for ridesharing.

You see how such steps might revitalize rural Canada, allowing youth to stay, businesses to thrive, and life in general to improve.

But we can’t have those things if we lose the spaces to support them. Every time a rural post office closes, we are recklessly scrapping a precious piece of publicly owned infrastructure that could have been used for so much more. That is why one rural Ontario mayor called a closed post office “another nail in the coffin of rural Canada.”

Instead of finding ways to shut down rural post offices, we should be reinventing them so that they can continue to forge vital connections between far-flung communities, as they have been doing since Canada’s birth.

Brenda McAuley is the National President of the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association.