Suck it up and say goodbye to door-to-door mail delivery

KAMLOOPS — A few years ago I interviewed a postie about mail service. I told her that when I was a kid, a fresh bottle of milk appeared on our front step every morning.

In cold weather, the cream would rise to the top and freeze, pushing the paper cap an inch or so above the neck of the glass bottle.

In the evening, my mom would stuff some bills into the neck of a clean, empty milk bottle and leave it on the step for the milkman. Nobody ever stole it. If she needed extra milk or cream, she left a note and it would be there the next morning.

Nobody delivers milk to the doorstep any more. We’ve all adjusted to buying it at the super market along with the rest of our groceries. Life goes on.

To even suggest nowadays that milk should be delivered to our homes would seem ridiculous. Yet we still expect our mail to show up in our mailboxes. We think of it as a Canadian entitlement. That was the point I was making with the postie.

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Like milk, newspapers are gone from the door step. Not even salesmen call — it’s a poor way to make a living. If we need a vacuum cleaner we go to the department store, if we want an encyclopedia we go online. The people who make “No Soliciting” signs are out of business because nobody needs them.

Yet we want to spend perfectly good money just for the questionable convenience of having bills and flyers show up in a mailbox beside our front door. It’s really quite a mystery, this obsession with door-to-door mail delivery.

A survey released this week by the Angus Reid Institute shows Canadians are so desperate to keep door-to-door mail delivery that they’re willing to have it cut from five to three days a week. Canada Post, they say, is an essential service.

Okay, but there’s nothing sacred about how we get the mail. Internet technology and private couriers do the job better and faster than the letter carrier.

When you drill into the reasons people insist they need door-to-door mail delivery, the answers are pretty thin. One of their favourites is that seniors would be inconvenienced without it. Did they stop drinking milk when the milk trucks stopped running?

We make adjustments. We find answers to the new ways.

My community mailbox is a mile and a half away from the house. We’ve lived in rural areas for many years and have survived the change from doorstep delivery to roadside mailboxes and then centralized community boxes.

There’s a guy who lives two blocks from our community-mail box who gets in his smart car every day and drives down the road to get his mail. He pulls up beside the mailboxes, leans out the window, pulls out his mail, and drives the two blocks back home.

Every time I see him I think, “Get some steps,” but I don’t know his circumstances and maybe he has a disability that prevents him from walking. Regardless, he’s worked out his own answer to the lack of doorstep delivery.

Canada Post’s revenue shortfall on letter mail was $256 million in 2016. Overall, it costs us about $8 billion a year to run Canada Post. It keeps its head above water by slashing post-office services and focusing on parcel-delivery revenues.

Justin Trudeau is expected to make a decision soon on door-to-door delivery. If we want to save Canada Post, if it’s an essential service, let’s get rid of door-to-door and bring back all the rural

post offices that are a lot more important to community life than bills being delivered to the doors of urban dwellers.

The answer to Canada Post’s woes isn’t in reducing door-to-door delivery, it’s in getting rid of it altogether.

Suck it up. Wave goodbye to the letter carrier, the same way we did with the milk man. We remember them fondly, but we don’t need them anymore.