Canada Post set to deliver fatal blow to rural mail service

If you have a rural mailbox, walk to the end of your driveway and kiss it goodbye. Canada Post is engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate traditional rural mail delivery. The stupidity of the program is exceeded only by the cost.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have already had service to their rural mail boxes cut off, including 200 in Ottawa. The number nationally could reach the hundreds of thousands if Canada Post has its way.

The problem, Canada Post says, is heavy rural traffic volumes that make delivery to end-of-the-lane boxes unsafe. Rural mail carriers have filed 1,700 health and safety complaints since 2004, and Canada Post is simply putting safety first, says corporate spokesman Sachin Despande.

No one is against safety, but the magnitude of Canada Post’s response is stunningly out of proportion to the problem. There are 843,000 roadside mailboxes in Canada. The corporation is reviewing the safety of each and every one of them, using a complex series of criteria developed by three separate consulting firms.

The cost of the rural mailbox program is $500 million over three years.

Yes, that’s half a billion dollars to deal with what’s actually a relatively small number of health and safety complaints.

The post office is averaging a little over 400 driver complaints a year. More than half of those, the company acknowledges, are ergonomics-related. If you have a rural mailbox, walk to the end of your driveway and kiss it goodbye. Canada Post is engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate traditional rural mail delivery. The stupidity of the program is exceeded only by the cost.

Tens of thousands of Canadians have already had service to their rural mail boxes cut off, including 200 in Ottawa. The number nationally could reach the hundreds of thousands if Canada Post has its way.

The problem, Canada Post says, is heavy rural traffic volumes that make delivery to end-of-the-lane boxes unsafe. Rural mail carriers have filed 1,700 health and safety complaints since 2004, and Canada Post is simply putting safety first, says corporate spokesman Sachin Despande.

No one is against safety, but the magnitude of Canada Post's response is stunningly out of proportion to the problem. There are 843,000 roadside mailboxes in Canada. The corporation is reviewing the safety of each and every one of them, using a complex series of criteria developed by three separate consulting firms.

The cost of the rural mailbox program is $500 million over three years.

Yes, that's half a billion dollars to deal with what's actually a relatively small number of health and safety complaints.

The post office is averaging a little over 400 driver complaints a year. More than half of those, the company acknowledges, are ergonomics-related.

So really we're talking a couple of hundred traffic-related complaints a year, and because of that, Canada Post is spending half a billion dollars and denying the convenience of rural mailbox service to a huge number of Canadians.

The implication is that the rural mail reduction is the result of complaints by workers, but the union thinks Canada Post is overreacting and has called for a moratorium on the costly rural mail program.

"The reaction of the employer has been disproportionate," says Canadian Union of Postal Workers president Denis Lemelin. His union has suggested nine steps less drastic than cancelling the service, but management won't work with them, Lemelin says. Among the union suggestions are grouping boxes together, allowing drivers to turn into driveways and letting drivers get out of their cars to service the boxes. The safety-conscious post office prohibits its drivers from leaving their vehicles. In effect, that means when the driver approaches a series of adjacent boxes, he has to stuff one box, drive a couple of feet, stuff the next, and so on. All because getting out of a car is so dangerous. One wonders how the residents on the street manage to pick up their own mail and live to tell the story.

The rural mailbox safety issue first arose in 2004, when the rural mail delivery people became employees of Canada Post instead of independent contractors. That gave them the right to file health and safety complaints about their work conditions.

So far, Canada Post has reviewed the safety of 100,000 mailboxes in various parts of the country. So sorry, spokesman Despande says, but no figures are available on how many have failed to meet Canada Post's rigorous new standards. CUPW is a little more forthcoming. It turns out that 49 per cent of mailboxes don't meet the standards, according to numbers Canada Post has given the union. Moving the mailboxes is often a solution, but there are still 27,000 people who have lost their traditional rural mail delivery.

When that happens, residents are given a choice of getting their mail at a post office, or being given a slot in a super mailbox, which can be up to two kilometres away.

In Ottawa, 400 boxes have been reviewed so far and half of them failed to meet standards. The areas affected are Manotick, Barrhaven, Merivale Road and Orléans. The formal review program hasn't started here yet, and Canada Post is responding to driver-initiated complaints, Despande says. Later this year, there will be safety audits of rural mailboxes in Stittsville, Navan, Osgoode and Carp. There are 10,000 rural mailboxes in the city.

As it happens, I live on rural Richmond Road, in one of the areas scheduled to lose rural mailbox service. If the way this particular road was handled is typical, Canada Post doesn't have much of a handle on customer relations. The first sign of trouble was a vague letter some weeks ago, saying Canada Post was reviewing mailbox safety. The next contact was a form letter saying there were unspecified safety problems and that I now had a choice of a community mailbox or a slot in a post office some distance away. I wasn't told mail service had already been cancelled, nor was I told where to get my mail.

The problem on my road, Canada Post says, is heavy traffic. The company's traffic count says 310 cars used the road during a 15-minute period starting at 3:30 in the afternoon. That's a car every three seconds. I've never witnessed that kind of traffic volume on the street, and the mail is delivered late morning, but there it is. Or so it seemed. Spokesman Despande subsequently determined that an error had been made in the count, which was immediately redone at actual mail delivery time. There were only 70 cars. Mail service will be restored to my house and most of the others on the street.

To get back to the bigger point, the federal government has to do something to bring some common sense back to Canada Post and stop the attack on rural mail service. The opposition parties have raised this matter in the House, but the government has not acted. And this is a government that pretends to understand rural Canada. More, it's a government that has specifically instructed Canada Post to "restore and maintain" rural mail service. A spokesman for Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon defended the safety initiative, but was unable to explain how reducing service squares with restoring and maintaining it. Maybe the explanation is in the mail.