Massiah’s Message ~ Say goodbye to the postman
Posted on December 18, 2013 by Maple CreekThis month Canadians began saying goodbye to the mailman. Just like the concept of having a milkman, the idea of the mail carrier will be wiped from history when Canada Post begins eliminating urban door-to-door mail service in 2014.Last week I found myself wishing CUPW, the postal union, would step in and force the issue into the courts. How else is it possible to stop this plan from becoming reality?
In a funny kind of way I felt like a clairvoyant waving my hands in the air predicting the end of the world. “Hum? I predict the postman will disappear. In 10 years baby boomers will get older. Hum, hum, the boomer won’t like using email. Hum, hum, hum…big, big problem!”
Joking aside, if mail carriers are phased out that will remove 8,000 people from the workforce at a time when 15,000 postal workers are retiring. It’s not just people losing jobs. I feel like because Canada Post is a Crown corporation, there should be some way the public can have a say about what they do since we’re paying for it.
If the plan goes through, the cost of an individual stamp will be $1. Right now a stamp costs about $0.63. It’s only a dollar, but if you are a small business, that’s a lot of money when you are trying to get by. Plus in cities you also have access to DHL, UPS, FedEx, Greyhound and Purolator. Why ship anything with Canada Post when someone else can do it faster for nearly the same price?
What’s gong to happen to older people, the baby boomers and those who can’t walk to the end of the avenue to access the box? What’s going to happen to the little old lady with arthritis in her hands when in the middle of winter she tries to use the key to her mail box? Well, they’re not really thinking of her, they’re thinking of the millions of young tech-savvy Canadians who use email. Someday those tech savvy young uns will be old too. Are they going to slip on the sidewalk and break a hip trying to reach their mail?
New developments are the only places where you’ll see super mailboxes in cities. Other than that you have to go to a large office to access a box. These are post office boxes that you pay for, like the big one in downtown Calgary with no parking, where you have to circle around the block over and over again for fear of getting a ticket from parking control.
To be fair, Canada Post is losing a bunch of money and these cuts are meant to keep them out of the red. They are facing a $1 billion deficit by 2020.
I was thinking about it last night and I had to laugh as I compiled a list of pros to no longer having urban mail delivery.
No longer will any Jerry Springer pregnancies be blamed on the blue-eyed and blonde-haired postman “Ken” that comes to your door everyday except for Sunday.
There won’t be anymore mailmen running away from vicious dogs. There won’t be anymore fists waving manically by your neighbour when the mailman walks through their garden destroying the flowers. There won’t be anymore circling in bright red marker RETURN TO SENDER when the mailman drops off the post for the last three years of the people one block over at your house, forcing you to drop it off at the depot and re-mail it. (You can’t drop it off at their house in the city, since you don’t know them, and they might be nuts.)
What annoys me about the whole thing is that the highers up made this kind of announcement right before Christmas, the time where Canada Post is most active delivering Christmas presents to people all over the country. Merry Christmas, right?
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