Raise your hand if anyone understands Canada Post’s recent decisions about rural mail delivery.
Rural residents from Fredericton, New Brunswick (NB) to Newmarket, Ontario (ON) have had their mail delivery
moved from nearby mailboxes to community boxes or post offices miles away. These folks are not happy. Most of
them have had home delivery for decades. Some cannot easily make the trip to the new location.
Equally worrisome are how rural residents will face similar challenges in the coming winter months unless
Canada Post and the federal Conservatives do what it takes to solve the rural delivery dilemma.
Here’s the problem. Some rural mail carriers have recently used their right to refuse unsafe work under
the provisions of the Canada Labour Code. Their health and safety concerns include increasingly dangerous
roads and repetitive stress injuries caused by reaching out passenger windows to put mail in rural
mailboxes.
Canada Post's reaction was to stop delivering mail to thousands of rural homes and instead pepper rural
communities with "community mailboxes" that swell their profits. This means that rather than fixing
unsafe conditions, the corporation has set up community mailboxes that may pass danger onto residents.
Rural mail carriers want to provide rural communities, where many of them grew up, with home delivery. But
they want to do it safely. It takes extremely dangerous conditions for rural workers to stop servicing the
communities they belong to and care for: So what made rural routes more dangerous besides more cars driving
faster? Why all of a sudden?
Before Jan. 1st, 2004, a rural postal worker was a contractor to Canada Post, not a unionized employee.
Canada Post could either ignore a contract worker’s complaint about dangerous work or say they would find
someone else to take the contract. And that’s what they did.
In June 2004, Canada Post told rural drivers to stop driving on the shoulder of the road with oncoming
traffic while delivering rural mail. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) agreed. After all, it’s
dangerous.
In January 2006, Canada Post told rural drivers to stop getting out of their car while delivering rural mail
or face discipline. CUPW disagreed but was ignored. This rule changed everything.
Picture the work now. Rural mail carriers have to stay on the right-hand side of the road, remain in the
vehicle, park, undo their seatbelt, shimmy across the front seat and it’s obstructions (including the stack
of mail they have to deliver), role down the window, stretch to reach the mailbox, role the window back up,
slide back over the obstruction, buckle up, drive 20 feet and do it all over again no matter what the
weather. Picture Tim Hortons suddenly making everyone drive up and order from the passenger side window. Now
picture doing this hundreds of times a day.
Why have rural workers complained in some communities and not others? Safety complaints have been clustered
around Fredericton NB, Newmarket ON, Dorion-Vaudreuil QC, and there have been a couple of refusals in British
Columbia (BC). That’s because Canada Post doesn’t enforce their standards consistently. A boss in Mount
Pearl, Newfoundland doesn’t manage the same as her counterpart in Dauphin, Manitoba and in Saskatchewan it’s
still legal to drive on the wrong side of the road.
So the west and the north may be quiet for now, but what if a Terrace, BC worker gets disciplined for getting
out of her vehicle to deliver mail and suddenly there are 300 safety complaints in BC? We had better come up
with national but locally-customized solutions quickly. CUPW is working with Canada Post to make sure that
happens.
Canada Post has to do a yearly review of all routes anyway. They could take some of the $199 million in
profits they made last year and use them to make rural routes safer. Or the government could give back some
of the $440 million in dividends Canada Post has paid them over the past ten years to preserve as much
delivery as possible to rural residents.
Many of the solutions are simple. The dangerous areas along any rural route can be made safer through steps
like: moving mailboxes further away from danger zones; letting drivers safely get out of their car again;
using dual-drive vehicles like the kind used in driving courses or right-hand drive vehicles like those used
in the U.S.; decreasing speed limits and so on.
With over $1 billion in profits for the past 11 years, Canada Post can afford some of these options,
especially with a legislated mandate to break even financially, expand service and develop good labour
relations.
Our public post office seems to be overly focused on making money rather than doing the job it was created to
do - serve the public. Canada Post has also made no clear commitment to rural residents who have lost
delivery. And it doesn't help that the federal government has said virtually nothing about what it intends to
do - a silence heard loud and clear throughout rural Canada.
Deborah Bourque, National President
Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)
