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Canada Post announced today that it will be phasing out door-to-door delivery to urban homes within the next 5 years. With today’s digital communication and the steady decline of snail mail, this news may not be shocking. But it’s definitely the end of an era.
Robert M. Campbell’s The Politics of Postal Transformation offers a critical analysis of the politics involved as postal services and governments juggle technological developments and public expectations in an effort to devise new strategies for the future.
The following excerpt outlines the history of Canada Post and its symbolic importance for the country:
The Post in Canada has had, and continues to have, enormous symbolic resonance. Canada is an extremely large country with a modest population and a harsh climate. It stretches 5,510 kilometres across six time zones comprising ten million square kilometres, eight million excluding the Arctic archipelago. Its postal density is 2.2 persons per square kilometre. The Post played a significant historical role in facilitating national expansion, building social cohesion, and extending the Canadian market while allowing Canadians the capacity to keep in touch with each other and their governments in a timely, accessible, and inexpensive way. Canada’s population is strung out in a long line along the Canadian-American border, with a substantial part of the population living in small towns and rural areas. The Post is still considered by most Canadians to be a vital universal service, notwithstanding the technological and communications alternatives to the letter. Indeed, there is remarkably little support for postal privatization in Canada. Public-opinion polls demonstrate a high degree of public support for the idea of the state-run Post. The business sector is not especially keen on the idea of privatization of a reasonably well run, inexpensive, and universal postal system. The idea of the public Post, then, remains a powerful cultural, economic, and political force in Canada.
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Early Days
The Post has roots in Canada’s early settler days, with the coureurs de bois acting as the first letter carriers in the sixteenth century and ships’ captains and tavern keepers providing early post offices. The French established the first postal system on a regular basis in 1734, basically for administrative purposes, connecting Montreal, Quebec City, and Trois-Rivières. Following the Conquest of 1760, the postal system was the first government institution to be put on a settled basis in British Canada. It was controlled by the British postmaster general until 1851, mainly for military and economic but also for fiscal ends (postal surpluses were sent back to the mother country). The British expanded the extensive French network in the late-eighteenth century, opening a postal route to Halifax and establishing post offices in all major communities. This expansion was uneven and service was poor, and postal reform comprised part of the agenda of the Rebellion of 1837-38. The Post Office also followed the opening of the west, and mail was sent to the Red River settlement (present-day Winnipeg) in the 1850 s. There were fewer than two dozen post offices at the end of the eighteenth century, but there were six hundred when the Post Office came under domestic control in 1851. The Province of Canada Post Office Department (POD) was the second department, after Customs and Excise, to receive independence from Britain. The provinces operated the postal system until Confederation in 1867, at which time the Post became an exclusive federal responsibility and the pod was one of the first departments formed. It was then directed to assist Canada’s social and economic development, which it did by extending the postal network across the country (there were almost ten thousand post offices by the end of the nineteenth century), introducing home delivery and free rural delivery, subsidizing publications mail, and providing a wide array of services at a low price.
To learn more about The Politics of Postal Transformation, click here.
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