Canada Post should deliver fairness

Opinion

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This article was published 26/01/2018 (2783 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Children exhibit an innate sense of fairness, a trait that would be immediately apparent to any adult who distributed chocolate to three children and ignored a fourth child in the group. The aversion to unfair treatment doesn’t disappear as we age. Adults expect that, in return for paying our fair share of taxes, government services will be distributed fairly.

Tens of thousands of Manitobans can mull the unfairness of it all as they walk to their community mailbox, an outing in freezing January weather that is not required of other Manitobans who stay toasty-warm as they still enjoy the convenience of mail delivered to their doors.

The half-baked transition to community mailboxes will remain half baked, the Liberal government announced on Wednesday, breaking Justin Trudeau’s election pledge to restore door-to-door delivery. Home delivery will not be restored to homes that lost it in 2015, but homes still receiving home delivery will not be transitioned to community mailboxes.

The decision means residents of the Maples, Tyndall Park, Garden City, West Kildonan, St. Vital and the city of Selkirk will be among 840,000 homes across Canada that will be forever stuck with community mailboxes. It is what it is, and that’s how it’ll stay.

Some residents deprived of home delivery might feel it’s only fair they now get a federal tax break, reasoning they shouldn’t have to pay full taxes to subsidize the 4.2 million addresses that still get home delivery. Hah! The chances of them getting a tax break because their home service has been cut is about as likely as the government stopping snow from falling and mosquitoes from biting.

The sour reaction of residents who feel robbed of their home delivery might seem overblown to people who, lucky enough to have an untouchable postal code, haven’t experienced community mailboxes. After all, those boxes are within a block or two of homes, and a bit of exercise never hurt anyone, right?

But a block or two might as well be a kilometre for shut-ins and people who can’t easily get around. The Liberals also announced Wednesday that a task force will be struck to examine how to get mail to seniors and people with mobility issues who have lost home delivery. Given the glacier-like slowness of government task forces, the community mailboxes of people with mobility issues will be stuffed beyond overflowing by the time the government determines how these people are supposed to get their mail.

Even for people who are able-bodied, community mailboxes are inconvenient, especially during Manitoba’s many days of inclement weather, when retrieving mail can require donning appropriate outerwear and navigating snowbanks, ice ruts and slush puddles.

Canada Post had hoped to save $350 million annually by converting the remaining addresses across the country. That would have been fair: either no one gets home delivery, or everyone gets it.

But the Trudeau government astutely sensed that continuing the plan to abolish home delivery would make Liberal MPs about as popular as U.S. President Donald Trump visiting a mosque.

An intriguing alternative to the Liberals’ half-baked postal plan was outlined in a 32-page report published by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute in 2015, when the conversion to community boxes began. It suggested Canada Post could cut costs by delivering mail to residential customers on a reduced schedule. In other words, everyone would still get home delivery, but only three days a week.

That’s a compromise that could deliver fairness to every Canadian household.