The community is not just the majority

Opinion

Know your audience — every member of it.

The City of Winnipeg is planning to remove its parking purchase stations, making those who want to park in the downtown use a smartphone app instead. But what if you don’t have a smartphone? You can buy vouchers for parking in a limited number of locations — hardly an ideal solution.

What’s also important to think about in that equation is not who, like you, has a smartphone and the ability to use a parking app, but those who don’t — and what it would mean to them.

That’s worth thinking about, not only for parking, but even as people think about the future of the public service of Canada Post.

Our national mail carrier is once again in labour trouble — and critical financial trouble as well — and is shedding users as a result of the variety of hurdles it’s facing. As customers leave, the financial picture grows even more dire. An industrial inquiry into the service has come up with a variety of potential solutions to the fiscal problems, among them, ending daily delivery to residential customers (but keeping it for commercial customers). The belt-tightening would mean more community mailboxes, different delivery schedules and a resumption of small postal office closures, among other things.

On the face of it, it probably looks attractive. After all, much more written communication is dealt with now over email than with paper, envelopes and stamps, and the vast majority of Canadians would probably respond to the loss of door to door delivery with little more than a shrug: flyers and direct advertising mail probably outnumbers arriving first-class mail by a handy margin.

But that’s not the case for everyone. There is still a significant minority that depends on paper mail as a public service — and just like removing credit card access to parking stations — see a critical loss in losing regular mail service.

The national mail carrier for Denmark and Sweden, PostNord, plans to stop all lettermail in Denmark by the end of 2025, because users are dwindling and most services — including government services — are primarily available digitally.

But that leaves a remarkable number of Danes — 270,000 people, or 4.5 per cent of the population — who still depend on lettermail out in the cold. As The Parliament Magazine points out, “this includes the chronically ill, the elderly and people with disabilities. These groups are already at risk of social isolation, and cutting mail service could add one more factor.”

The effect is much the same as the fallout from Winnipeg’s parking app decision — yes, you can go to one of three locations and buy paper parking vouchers, so there is at least lip service to a workaround. But that hardly provides an equal opportunity of access to everyone who may need to park at places like the downtown Manitoba Clinic for a diagnostic medical procedure.

Instead, the marginalized, quite simply, grow even more marginalized. And feel even more like they are not considered as a part of decisions that are meant to reflect the needs of the entire community, not simply what is the majority of a community at any given time.

There’s a clear message in that about lettermail, and about parking apps, and about any number of other decisions that may be made with the majority in mind, and the minority ignored.

When you make changes to a public service, you have to consider not only the people that are happy to be under the new umbrella, but also the number that you’re leaving out in the rain.

Access means that you don’t build more hurdles for those who already have them. The community is everybody.