I received an e-mail recently from a contact asking me to sign a petition hosted at Change.org and titled, “Don’t let Canada Post end door to door delivery.” The petition’s author suggested that people use social media to spread the word.
Is it not ironic that a person seeking others to participate in a petition for the retention of door-to-door delivery of letter mail would do so by the use of electronic mail? With the click of a mouse, a person or business can distribute, nearby or half a world away, a document to thousands of electronic “mail boxes” within seconds.
Communication by e-mail, text messaging or other social media tools is ubiquitous because it’s fast and convenient. Canada Post cannot compete with that. Petitioning Canada Post to retain a service model that incurs high expense, and that faces rapid decline due to the high rate of adoption of electronic delivery of documents, is misguided.
Concern has been raised that it will become difficult for seniors living in cities, who have sidewalks and streetlights available for them, to gather their mail from a community mailbox; this likely doesn’t resonate with seniors living in rural areas who have visited their community mailboxes without sidewalks and streetlights for years.
Fear that people living alone will be further isolated after losing the regular contact by a letter carrier, is overdone.
Use of traditional mail will remain in some form, as there will always be some documents that must be transferred between parties in their original format, not as electronic copies. Most Canadians, if they haven’t already, will choose to receive the majority of their mail electronically, with the rest at a community mailbox.
Change is not easy for everyone, and many are comfortable with the way things are. But societies themselves, and the infrastructure that helps them thrive, are constantly evolving. Cessation of mail delivery to your door is a result of that evolution.
* Alberni Valley resident Roland Smith penned this feature letter to the editor