You couldn't swing a dead cat in recent days without hitting some editorial piece regarding the end of home delivery by Canada Post.
It's easy to see why - home delivery is being discontinued for one third of the country, and the other two thirds of the country have wished at one point or another they had it.
I know I think that way on frigid days like we've had much of early December. It sure would be nice to just open the door, reach into the mailbox, and then slam the door shut.
We used to have such a luxury in North Battleford. I enjoyed home delivery, but remarkably we have survived without it for the last five years. I am capable of walking a block to the mailbox.
One of our neighbours receives mineral rights cheques for his land. We often head to the mailbox at the same time. I sometimes tease him about eagerly awaiting his monthly fortune in the mail. I usually just get bills and bank statements. On the rare occasion there might be a cheque. About three Christmas cards show up, and that's it. A few magazines come in each month. The rest is junk mail.
A friend asked me when was the last time I wrote a letter. Ummm…
I couldn't recall. A personal letter? One written by hand, without a keyboard? It would be at least a decade - when I was working in northern Alberta. I think I got home from that job before my letters got to my wife.
My personal and professional lives live and breathe by email. As a newspaper editor, I have a reporter who works in Lloydminster, seven hours' drive away. We've seen each other maybe eight times in five years, and not at all in the past two years. Yet we work well together, putting together a monthly publication via the Internet.
I work from home. I upload my finished stories and photos via FTP, or file transfer protocol. It means I don't get out much. When I do shop for things like cameras or computers, almost all of it is done online and delivered by courier. Most of it comes by Purolator, on time and reliably. Some comes by STC bus from Regina. But out of the 40 or so packages I might have received this past year, maybe three came by Canada Post. (Ironically, Purolator is part of Canada Post.)
It's not that my experiences are abnormal. Rather, they have become much more common, if not the norm. Almost everyone has a similar story. Canada Post had no choice but to shake things up.
While the increase in the price of an individual stamp to an even loonie was surprising in its amount, it was not in its necessity. Given that I buy four to 10 stamps a year, the additional cost to me will be less than a fast food meal.
The world will not end from these changes. Canada Post needs to survive somehow.
The song goes "Video killed the radio star." If the Internet and couriers haven't killed the post office, they've severely wounded it. Amputating home delivery and giving it a revenue injection of higher postal rates might be the only way to save the patient.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
