EDITORIAL: Let’s not abandon mail delivery just yet
When is the last time you received a personal letter by post? More to the point, when’s the last time you wrote and mailed one yourself?
Your answer — on the spectrum between “today” and “so long ago I can’t remember” — probably depends on your age and the ages of your friends and relatives. It’s a sad development that mainly older people are left using the Post Office to communicate with their dear ones.
For many of us the mail brings only flyers, dwindling magazine subscriptions, and the few bills and statements we haven’t switched over to online management yet. The expense and effort involved in writing, packaging, stamping, posting, sorting, transporting and delivering personal missives around the world seem ridiculously excessive to those of us who fire off emails, texts, tweets and other social media messages on a daily basis for next to nothing and with nearly instant delivery.
This may be why there’s a certain inevitability hanging over Canada Post’s proposal to drop residential delivery.
Some of our political reps who question elimination of the service are seeking instead a reduction of the service.
This seems a reasonable compromise at this time. A large segment of our citizenry have been bypassed by the technological revolution and still require the service. We owe it to them to help keep them in the social loop with at least twice weekly mail service.
For now at least. We’re sure to be revisiting this issue.
