Canada Post’s recent announcement of its plan to cease door-to-door mail delivery in urban areas was so badly timed that at first I wondered if it wasn’t just a holiday prank. Informing people of cuts to the postal system during the only month when the majority of us rely on mail service seems like the death bellow of a wounded caribou on the tundra, not the strategic rationalization of a healthy institution.
I think it’s fair to speculate about how far the federal government was involved in this poorly timed decision — I’m sure Canada Post is not the primary architect of its increasing irrelevance.
For most of us, the holiday season is the only time we do much with the postal system. The flurry of Facebook messages I’ve received asking for my mailing address is delightfully symptomatic of our brave new digital world: When you can instantly call or text your nearest and dearest, you don’t really need to know their postal codes or street addresses.
It’s also sweetly anachronistic that despite this, we still want to send our friends and family Christmas cards (an idea that seems great until you realize that everyone else is thinking the same thing and you don’t have any stamps and you should have done it last week only you forgot and now you have to pay for rush delivery).
The rationale, I guess, is that the Internet has made the postal service outdated to the point of obsolescence. Certainly for my generation, the concept of the post office is quaint and old-timey. We use it, but barely. Most of the mail that comes to my door is meant for the previous tenants.
Like television news, physical newspapers and land lines, the postal system has had to face the reality of the Internet. And yeah, the Internet’s great — it’s what allows me to pay my bills, do my Christmas shopping, talk to my friends and mail my column to my editor without having to change out of my pyjamas. (I live the dream, I know.)
But not everybody has the Internet.
Several weeks ago, I argued that one of the reasons libraries are still crucial is because they provide free Internet to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to use it — people who are elderly or unable to afford a computer. But we don’t have enough of those services to assume that everyone has reliable access to the Internet, or could use it even if they did.
Why is cutting services for those who need them the answer here? What about those who have no other recourse for receiving mail? People with mobility issues, for example, or those who work long hours won’t find this pick-up-your-own-mail thing so great. And those are the people who should get more help, not less.
So I don’t buy the argument that the Internet has made mail service obsolete. It hasn’t. It would be wonderful if we could look at the postal system and the Internet as complementary, rather than competing — and certainly Canada Post has tried to do this in the past. (It’s just a shame that their attempt to establish an online presence resulted in the cumbersome e-post system.)
Sean Casey has observed that “cuts to government jobs and services ... loosen the threads that bind us together” by gutting the institutions that connect us. It would have been wonderful if Canada Post had engaged in an opt-in, opt-out initiative to move those of us who could go completely digital to online services, while retaining mail services for those who couldn’t. We could have streamlined, rather than sacrificing.
Is Canada Post perfect? No. Could it be more effective? Yes. Do I resent them for that time I was forced to buy hockey stamps because they ran out of regular ones? Of course. But mail delivery is a government service, and government services should be there for the people who need them.
I’m not disappointed because it’s going to inconvenience me (in fact, it’s going to save me some trips to the recycling bin). I’m disappointed because it’s one more way in which we are alienating people from each other, and making life harder for people who already have things hard, rather than investing in services that bring us together.
