Canada Post converting door-to-door to community mailbox delivery

[Liberalman]

Canada Post converting door-to-door to community mailbox delivery
Canada Post releases guiding principles for converting door-to-door to community mailbox delivery « Post & Parcel


Canada Post has released guiding principles that will govern its approach to converting the remaining five million addresses with delivery at their door to community mailbox delivery over the next five years.

The principles are:

• Canada Post recognises that dense urban cores in our larger cities, with their older neighbourhoods and smaller lots, present different challenges for locating community mailboxes than suburban areas. Accordingly, Canada Post will leave the majority of these areas until the final stage of this multi-year project. The postal service will take the necessary time to understand their unique needs and find solutions that work for these neighbourhoods.
• Canada Post will be sensitive to the needs of seniors and of disabled Canadians. Canada Post is developing alternative approaches for people with significant mobility challenges, who lack viable alternatives and upon whom delivery to a community mailbox would impose an unacceptable hardship.
• There will be no change in delivery to people living in apartment buildings, seniors’ buildings and condominiums who already have mail delivered in the building lobby. In addition, customers who have mail delivered to a rural mailbox (a customer-owned mailbox at the end of a driveway) will not be affected by this change.
• The postal service will work with community leaders and municipal planning officials to choose safe and appropriate sites.
• Canada Post will seek the views of affected citizens directly, through multiple channels including direct mail surveys and online feedback tools.
• The Crown corporation will be as innovative and flexible as possible, while fulfilling its responsibility to protect the financial sustainability of postal service for all Canadians. It will look at various solutions and different equipment, taking the necessary time to address any significant challenges in a given community.
• Canada Post will respect the needs of businesses to have mail delivered to their door. The vast majority of business addresses will continue to have mail and parcels delivered to their door and will experience no change. The businesses that will continue to have delivery to the door:
  • are located in well-established business areas, such as main streets or “business corridors”
  • or receive a relatively large volume of mail or parcels.

The conversion of delivery at the door to community mailbox delivery will have no impact on the two thirds of Canadian households that already receive their mail and parcels through community mailboxes, grouped or lobby mailboxes or rural mailboxes. Community mailboxes offer individually locked mail and small packet compartments as well as locked compartments for securely receiving parcels. The initial neighbourhoods slated for conversion in the second half of 2014 will be announced in the coming weeks once plans are finalized.
Converting the remaining five million Canadian households that receive mail delivery to the door to community mailbox delivery was announced in December 2013 as part of Canada Post’s Five-point Action Plan. Together, the initiatives announced in this plan will protect Canada’s postal service for future generations. Ignoring Canada’s massive shift away from mail to digital alternatives would put Canada Post on track for substantial yearly losses that would threaten the existence of the postal service.
The conversion will provide significant savings to Canada Post by allowing it to hire only those delivery employees it needs to replace departing employees during a wave of retirements. Canada Post expects nearly 15,000 employees to retire or leave the company over the next five years. This is more than enough to allow for the reduction of between 6,000 and 8,000 positions, mainly through attrition.

 

[lone wolf]

Canada post wants to cut jobs at the bottom so there's more money to feed the top

 

[#juan]

Canada Post is being killed by unions. Right now the average starting wage for postal workers is $23.00 per hour for basically unskilled labour. Postal workers will likely be on strike some time this month. It seems they want more and more money for less and less work. I don't blame the workers. I blame the unions.

Remember when we had dependable, two or three day delivery of first class mail in Canada. God! Christmas cards were taking up to a week and a half this year. We don't write letters anymore. E-mails are so much less trouble and more reliable.

 

[lone wolf]

I can remember a time when if you wrote "Boycot Postal Codes" on your letter, it got there quicker

 

[taxslave]

Except for the cities most of Canada has never had home delivery and many do not even have group boxes yet we pay the same price for stamps.

 

[lone wolf]

Rural mail delivery ended years ago. Snowplow operators everywhere breathed sighs of relief....

 

[taxslave]

Rural mail delivery ended years ago. Snowplow operators everywhere breathed sighs of relief....

SO how come the junk mail keeps getting through?

 

[lone wolf]

SO how come the junk mail keeps getting through?

Junk mail is really versatile stuff....

 

[#juan]

SO how come the junk mail keeps getting through?

I'm guessing that the post office gets more money to deliver a flyer than a letter.

 

[lone wolf]

I'm guessing that the post office gets more money to deliver a flyer than a letter.

Sure they do.... Toppers Pizza spends more money on flyer mailouts than I do for First Class....

 

[Ron in Regina]

Canada Post is being killed by unions. Right now the average starting wage for postal workers is $23.00 per hour for basically unskilled labour. Postal workers will likely be on strike some time this month. It seems they want more and more money for less and less work. I don't blame the workers. I blame the unions.

Remember when we had dependable, two or three day delivery of first class mail in Canada. God! Christmas cards were taking up to a week and a half this year. We don't write letters anymore. E-mails are so much less trouble and more reliable.

$23.00/hr use to be the starting wage I'm told from a Postal Worker.
That's gone down over time.

 

[Spade]

I don't buy the theory that unions are just "minion rings" for the unworthy.

 

[Liberalman]

Canada Post is being killed by unions. Right now the average starting wage for postal workers is $23.00 per hour for basically unskilled labour. .

If one were to look at the university grads of the financial industry which lost a big chunk of money for the investors one can say they are unskilled as well.

What exactly is unskilled to you #juan?

With the new community mailboxes home owners can finally let the dog out and no one will cross the lawns. With all the security intrusions that our government is accused of on Canadian's digital devices, mail is just too labour intensive to open and read on what people are saying. Once the door to door delivery infrastructure is gone all Canadian lives will be an open book for governments to see where the money is hiding. This will put another feather in the federal Conservative hat and further weaken the Canadian way of life.

 

[lone wolf]

So who is going to unslip city sidewalks so walkers and wheelchairs can access community boxes seeing as how, and at the same time, government is talking to keep seniors in their homes

 

[SLM]

So who is going to unslip city sidewalks so walkers and wheelchairs can access community boxes seeing as how, and at the same time, government is talking to keep seniors in their homes

It'll just be another gap that crops up between the talk of keeping seniors in their homes and the reality of keeping seniors in their homes. Government's been talking about that for years and there are plenty of gaps, I've seen them.

Now, having said that, mail delivery and truth be told, mail itself, is becoming obsolete. It may be that there will be difficulties for some seniors in the transition now, but give it another 10-15 years and it won't be. In 20-25+ years from now, when I hit that age bracket, I'll be bringing my lack of paper mail and my usage of e-mail and full online services with me.

I'm not meaning to diminish the difficulties some may face now, it'll be a difficult transition to be sure but in the end it is probably necessary and the level of difficulty for the senior population won't be permanent and ongoing. As each generation moves up, it'll become less and less of an issue.

 

[karrie]

So who is going to unslip city sidewalks so walkers and wheelchairs can access community boxes seeing as how, and at the same time, government is talking to keep seniors in their homes

I don't understand this argument.
If someone is too disabled to get to their mail boxes, then they should have homecare worker anyhow. If you can't get to a mail box, you're not getting to the grocery store, or shoveling your sidewalks. You need help, plain and simple. And adding 'also get the mail' to that, isn't a huge extra burden.

 

[lone wolf]

It's a question that's come up frequently on local news. I can't see it being much of an issue - but then, the mile-long walk to my community box and back is only a fifth of a routine day with the dog. If I don't walk it, I drive it. My concern is with the guy who keeps putting other people's mail in my box. How much of mine vanishes?

 

[karrie]

It's a question that's come up frequently on local news. I can't see it being much of an issue - but then, the mile-long walk to my community box and back is only a fifth of a routine day with the dog. If I don't walk it, I drive it. My concern is with the guy who keeps putting other people's mail in my box. How much of mine vanishes?

I know the news covers it a lot... they NEED contention. But, how real of an issue is it?

Personally, cities need to be held more accountable for 'their' sidewalks, citywide, mailboxes or not. But, the disability issue doesn't make sense to me when arguing against the boxes.

And yeah, I've slowly been converting all my critical mail to paperless, because I really don't want Bill-BOb next door opening it.

 

[taxslave]

$23.00/hr use to be the starting wage I'm told from a Postal Worker.
That's gone down over time.

That is the number given me a few weeks back by one of our volunteer firefighters that works there.

I know the news covers it a lot... they NEED contention. But, how real of an issue is it?



For the millions of us that have never had home delivery it is not an issue at all. But CBC and postal workers are both government union employees. That is the only connection I see. With perhaps a few people with nothing better to do with their time than whine.

 

[Durry]

Three days a week mail delivery is all the average household needs today. In fact most could probably get by with twice a week .

But anything more than three times a week is a waste of money!!