Door-to-door services in Selkirk nearing the end

RECORD PHOTO BY AUSTIN GRABISH  

A postal worker delivers mail to a home in Selkirk last Friday. The door-to-door service in Selkirk is expected to be phased out for good later this year. 

By Austin Grabish, the Selkirk Record 

Selkirk residents are one step closer from having to get their mail from community mailboxes.

Representatives from Canada Post will be conducting door-to-door consultations in Selkirk as part of an outreach initiative in the coming weeks.

The in-person consultations are a follow-up to surveys that were sent out to residents last year.

Canada Post staff will be informing residents about the proposed locations for their new community mailboxes and will be asking residents for feedback before the new mail sites are built.

Residents who live next to property Canada Post is considering building on should expect to be contacted.

“It’s about choosing the right site and doing some consultation with the municipality as well as the affected residents,” said Canada Post spokeswoman Anick Losier in a phone interview last Friday.

Canada Post announced it was putting an end to all door-to-door delivery services last year.

The move is part of a five-point company restructuring plan Losier said was needed to protect the public postal service.

“With Canadians changing how they communicate it was creating a huge gap in our revenue stream.”

She said because Canadians are sending far fewer letters than they once did the postal service has been hit hard as letter mail revenue was what the company was once based on.

But Canada Post has reported a profit every year since the mid 1990s with the exception of 2011.

Fifty thousand workers were locked out of their jobs that year as the Crown corporation made negotiations with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

The cost of mail delivery for one home is estimated to be $298 per year. Losier said the community mailboxes will be less than half the cost of that price.

She said mail delivered to one address at a community mailbox will cost somewhere around $116 per year.

Losier said residents will get six – 10 letters informing them of the conversion process.

Around 3,000 homes in Selkirk are affected as part of the phasing out of door-to-door services.

The conversation process in Selkirk is expected to be complete this fall.

By the end of the year close to one million addresses will have been converted across the country, Losier said.

Canada Post reported a $13 million profit in the third quarter of 2014.

-- First published in the Selkirk Record print edition March 5, 2015 p.2