What will be lost if Canada Post goes out of business?

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NETHERHILL, SASK. — The letters would arrive as if by magic carpet — a folded sheet of ink-blotted paper borne across an ocean of fear. It was the Canadian prairie in 1957: the grit of the homesteaders, the groan of the wind, the tight-clenched grip of winter.

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Suddenly, late at night, a telephone call from Jean Morrison, postmistress of Netherhill, Saskatchewan, a speck on the plains southwest of Saskatoon, three streets wide and two avenues tall. Gravel streets, a railside grain elevator, a dozen houses, a hockey rink, a curling sheet, a tiny dinette on the shoulder of No. 7 highway operated by a woman with a secret past and a string of numbers tattooed in blue on her arm.

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“Agnes, you better get down here.”

The return address sends shivers: USSR. No one else in town must know about this.

The envelope is addressed to Mrs. Agnes Spicer, née Butorina, a war bride and widow and mother of three from the fastness of the Soviet Union, the swift-current rivers of the Ural Mountains, a place called Chusovoy.

“Dear Sister,” the enclosure begins.

Vodka and Kahlua. Cigarette smoke. Phonograph records of the Red Army Chorus, 78 rpm. A little girl peeping from the stairway of a green house in the snow.

“Joy. Elation,” says Roxana Spicer, Agnes’s daughter. “The letter was the physical embodiment of the possibility of my mother being happy … for one moment.”

“There was a religious silence,” Roxana remembers as we lunch in Toronto’s trendy Beach, so far from Netherhill. “Nobody spoke. She closed up the coffee shop and went over to the house to read it. In the time that it took for her to read that letter, she was transported from my world to another place.”

“As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country,” says Proverbs 25:25.

“It wasn’t what the letter said,” Spicer, an author and documentary producer now living in Toronto, tells me. “It was that it was last held by her sister in the very home where she was born, in a place entirely off-limits to Western eyes.

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“Neither my aunt nor my mother believed they would ever see each other again. Those letters were the closest thing to touching each other physically that they could ever hope for. I can still see Mom folding and refolding that tissue-thin paper from Russia, reading and rereading her sister’s words.

“Here was the most fragile connection to family, culture and love. They both had defied the odds. They survived Hitler. They found love. They had families. They had homes.

“My aunt and my mother stored the letters from each other in their bedroom drawers for decades. The letters gave them some kind of spiritual peace: that despite the enormous distance between them, their love endured, and they would always have each other.”

“I see her in my mind’s eye as she flicks away imaginary dust specks on a purple paisley tablecloth and sits staring at the letter,” Spicer writes in The Traitor’s Daughter, her book about her lifelong search for the wartime secrets of combat and capture that her mother would not reveal. “Someone always got to the envelope before her. It could have been the KGB in Russia. It could have been the RCMP.”

What was the power of a handwritten note that a single sheet of paper might be so threatening to the Soviet colossus? Or to the Cold War security of The Land of Living Skies?

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You might as well ask: What is the weight of all the tears that fell on all the letters from faraway sisters before the digital revolution reduced our most private poetries to smiley faces and LOLs?

And what will be lost in Canada when the day comes — and it is coming, maybe in 10 years, maybe in five — when, like poor Charlie Brown on Valentine’s Day, all our mailboxes are empty?

***

Climax, Sask., a border town on the Canadian prairie in 2024. There is a standard brick post office on the main street, servicing fewer than 150 souls. Postal Code: S0N 0N0. Outside the building are a couple of blue recycling bins filled with supermarket ads and charity appeals and various other jetsam.

Walk to the post office, open your box, yank out the flyers, throw them away.

Several of Climax’s 150 souls are passing the day at an emporium that officially is the Super Fast Grocery, but that everyone in town calls “the store.”

I go in and we talk about the past and the future of the daily personal mail, if indeed it has a future in this isolated settlement.

“Do you think that Canada Post will go out of business?” The agency has taken to calling its enormous annual losses “unsustainable” and has warned that it may soon run out of cash.

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“It’s like the Pony Express and the telegram,” says Nancy Glenn, who is working the register and who also serves as the Climax municipal librarian. “The world is changing. We’re not going to hold the kids back.”

“We had a school, and they closed it,” another woman laments. “We had a hospital, and they closed it. We had a bank, and they closed it. We had a credit union …”

“The post office will be here until my dementia kicks in, and then I won’t care,” Glenn says.

“Would you be willing to pay more taxes to keep Canada Post in business?”

“It’s like beating a dead horse,” replies the cashier/librarian, waving off the idea.

“Did you ever receive a piece of mail that changed your life?” I ask the folks at the store, and Glenn says that she once met a man at a wedding in British Columbia while she was living in Manitoba, and “Ron didn’t like talking,” and so they began to exchange letters until he finally invited her out to Saskatchewan.

“That was three kids and five grandkids ago,” Glenn says with a smile.

“I used to send 25 Christmas cards but now I only send two,” a woman named Joan Lowe says. “Everyone I used to send them to has died.”

Lowe excuses herself and walks to her home around the corner and comes back with a 9-penny Aerogramme postmarked in December 1970 at Pumping Station, Stanground, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England. It was from her mother.

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I used to send 25 Christmas cards but now I only send two…Everyone I used to send them to has died

Joan Lowe

“First of all, I must say a big thank-you for thinking of me on my birthday,” the letter begins. The daughter has kept this mundane epistle for more than half a century.

“Your mother touched that with her own hands,” I say, and Lowe’s eyes begin to turn red.

***

I arrive at another prairie hamlet named — I don’t know why — for the Greek philosopher Plato. Its population is three. On an unpaved street, surrounded by shining grain storage containers and the skeletons of houses where families once loved and laughed and mourned, I find myself outside the smallest free-standing post office in Canada.

Inside, it is as warm and cosy as a Hobbit’s hut. A woman named Maureen Fitzmaurice Jacobson is behind the counter, as she always is from 8:30 a.m. till noon on business days, doing no business at all.

“People don’t believe it,” Jacobson says. But it is real — even in a gasping burg like Plato, Sask., it still is possible to mail a letter to Pumping Station or Chusovoy.

“I can do MoneyGrams, I can do anything that a big post office can do,” the Plato postmistress says. In 2016, she outbid three other contenders to buy the shack and keep it going out of love for what the mail once meant, and what it still could mean. (And for a nice salary, commensurate with what a postmaster earns in Regina or Estevan.) But she only stocks a few booklets of domestic and cross-border postage stamps and, on many days in a town of three people, she sells none of them.

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“If I order them all, there’s no room for me,” says the postmistress, and she joshes that, during COVID, Canada Post sent her advisories about keeping her clients six feet away from each other in a vestibule that is barely five feet wide.

“The mail was EVERYTHING,” she is remembering now. “It was how you connected with your family and your friends.”

We step outside into a cloudless prairie morning and gape at the abandoned town.

“It’s a small community and you all get together,” the postmistress says. “Or you used to. It’s just a bin yard now. Its lifetime is running out.”

***

What great timing — here I am, trying to write a eulogy for the handwritten letter, and as soon as I start typing, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers calls a national strike and Canada Post locks them out.

Nearly three weeks later, I’ve finished typing and they STILL are not back at work — reinforcing the mail’s growing irrelevance to millions of Canadians while compelling many shoppers to actually walk into a real store and schlep home what they purchase. At press time, Canada Post reportedly was offering “greater flexibility” to its delivery model and CUPW was “reviewing the proposal.”

So now I am in the back-street headquarters of the Toronto Local of CUPW, with a passionate Abdi Hagi Yusuf, the secretary-treasurer of this particular organization.

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“The post office IS relevant!” Yusuf exclaims. “Many people think the post office is only delivering letters and parcels, but it is much more than that! All the necessities of all Canadian communities come through the post office!

“Probably most people, they only think letters, but that is like seeing a TTC bus and thinking, ‘It is only a bus.’ But it is not only a bus — it is the doctor on the bus going to treat someone, it is the teacher on the bus going to teach in a school, it is the plumber on the bus going to fix the pipes.

A greeting card is a constant reminder in the physical world that somebody cares about you.

Heather Jean, greeting card artist

“The post office delivers EVERYTHING. Today, it is more relevant than ever! During the two years and a few months of COVID, the post office stayed on the work.

“Big companies only go where the money is. The post office goes EVERYWHERE.

“It is the glue that connects Canadians.”

Some glue. The average Canadian household was receiving seven pieces of personal mail (bills, cheques, postcards, birthday greetings) each week as recently as 2006. Now that number is down to two. Canada Post lost $748 million in 2023 and $315 million more through the first nine months of 2024.

“When was the last time you sent an actual letter?” I ask Yusuf, who joined the postal workforce in 1990 as a sorter inside the massive Gateway facility in Mississauga, Ont. Now he is an elected union officer, responsible, among other duties, for keeping track of the members who receive $56 a day for walking the picket lines and keeping the fires stoked in the garbage cans.

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“I just sent a thank-you card to someone who did something nice for me,” Yusuf answers.

“Well, it won’t get there anytime soon,” I remind him. “You’re on strike.”

The secretary-treasurer tells me that his brother went to his mailbox on the morning of my visit, even though the walkout/lockout had started.

Yusuf beams. “Going to the mailbox is in our muscle memory!

“I always have stamps,” he announces, and he opens a desk drawer and holds up a pair of tiny Permanent-rate definitives from the “From War and Wide” series that, if he bought them at a deep discount on Facebook or eBay, may well be Chinese counterfeits.

“We used to get letters and that was the main communications system,” Yusuf recalls of his childhood in Somalia. He remembered that a directory of eager pen pals would be passed around his school, and every child would pick someone and write him or her a real letter.

“Letters person to person, they are finished,” Yusuf suddenly blurts. So much for the national glue.

“When we realized that letters are going down and parcels are going up, Canada Post should have done something,” he declares. He inserts the union’s familiar refrain that turning every post office into a bank will solve everything.

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“I don’t know why they are not doing it!” Yusuf cries. “They want to compete with Amazon — you create two-tier, three-tier, you’re killing the future!”

***

Enter the Toronto local CUPW president, a hale and amusing man named Mark Lubinski, 34 years on the force, all of them indoors, currently in the category of Electro-Mechanical Tech.

“I don’t want to be a letter carrier,” he explains, tumbling into his rummage-sale office after a chilly morning on the line. (Think African masks, Ukrainian porcelain, photos of the Lubinski family cat.) “They’re broken people — after 10 years, their knees are shot, their backs are shot, then they go inside and they consider it jail. They miss being outside, talking to people.

“I started out working nights,” he says. “I was jet-lagged for 20 years, but I was there for my kids.”

“What made you a union guy?” I ask.

“Being around other union guys, being shoved around like you’re nobody,” Lubinski says. He tells me that his father worked at Canada Wire and his mother laboured at a chocolate factory and she would come home reeking of cocoa. Blue collar all the way.

The president avows that — for the first few days of the disruption, at least — this strike has energized the membership and enforced their brotherhood.

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“To me, it’s spiritual,” he states. “I collected stamps as a kid, I was always fascinated with the mail and how it got to people wherever they were. But I think that Canada Post has taken that away and I don’t know if it’ll be back.”

I tell the striking unionists about Charlie Brown and his empty mailbox.

“We love happiness!” trumpets Yusuf. “We love communication! We love family-hood!

“Empty mailbox should not happen!”

***

“You’re breaking my heart,” says Heather Jean when I mention Charlie Brown.

Jean is a Toronto artist and businesswoman who draws, writes and produces tens of thousands of greeting cards every year under the brand names Hazy Jean, Little Jeanie, Juste pour toi and Crewe Avenue. She finds this work more satisfying than her previous occupation, which was driving a taxi. Like many of us, but not enough of us, she loves our dying personal mail.

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“I know that for greeting cards, our primary customers are usually a little bit older,” she says. “We try to get younger kids involved but 55-plus are the ones more likely to be sending cards and being in touch with people.

“Seniors get a card and they set it up on their mantel or their TV table and they look at it, sometimes for years. Not just birthday cards or ‘Thinking of You’ cards, but especially sympathy cards and the knowledge that someone cared enough to purchase a card and write it and mail it.

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“A greeting card is a constant reminder in the physical world that somebody cares about you.”

Jean says that she ships most of her cards — about 120,000 a year, down from 750,000 before COVID shuttered so many retail outlets — by the private company Canpar Express. “But we have a customer in Churchill, Manitoba, and Canpar doesn’t go there, only Canada Post.”

This is another familiar argument for retaining a delivery service that is mandated to attend every single resident of Churchill or Plato or Netherhill. But does that service have to be the brontosaurus called Canada Post?

I still write letters. I encourage people to write letters. It has such an emotional impact. My kids won’t do that

David Engel

“I hesitate to say this because it’s not my business,” Jean says. “I draw cards, they do their thing — but in the parcel delivery industry, there’s so much competition and they’re trying to get more of that. They’re even considering hiring part-timers for the weekends. I’m not trying to do everything that my competitors are doing. Why should they?”

The conversation turns to a remarkable young woman — in Toronto at the time — who has touched the lives of billions of people, but not by sending a folded piece of pulp that says Thinking of You.

“I love that Taylor Swift is spreading joy,” says Jean. “I’m not a billionaire, but I also try to spread some joy. ‘Nice cards for nice people.’ That’s my message to the world.”

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I remind her, “A sympathy card is not joy.”

“No,” she says, “But it is comfort. The comfort that someone is thinking of you, hoping to brighten your day. The words that the person writes inside may be more important than the printed words.”

“Is the age of greeting cards ending like the age of blacksmiths and horseshoes?” I ask.

“And fax machines,” Jean inserts. “It hasn’t finished yet, but it’s probably on its way out. The world is changing and the ways that people communicate are changing.

“We have a customer, the Northern Toybox in Dawson Creek, and we shipped cards to them by Canada Post on Oct. 23 and the cards arrived — yay! They have always mailed a cheque for payment but this time they sent an e-transfer. That’s just a small example of how the way we do things change and might not change back after the strike.

“It’s sad for me to see it go. My grandmother made greeting cards, and that is what started me on this journey. It is sad to see that generations to come won’t be doing that. But nothing lasts forever.”

***

“The question here is what is ‘mail’?” asks David Engel, a former executive of the Canadian Direct Mail Association, and a man who has spent 40 years thrusting those supermarket flyers into your mailbox, the ones that nearly everyone recycles without reading. (A two per cent rate of response is considered about average.)

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“There will always be a service that delivers commercial mail to you. There will always be somebody.

“(Canada Post) currently has the exclusive right by law to use your mailbox. Nobody else can use a mailbox. But that personal mail will be lost and the service will become a business service of package delivery and it will become commodified, and then the question becomes, ‘How cheap can I deliver?’

“It will become a private business. Emotional mail will disappear. Personal mail, the individual mail, will cease to exist.”

“When?” I ask.

“I think it’s inevitable within 10 years,” Engel estimates. “It’s a generational thing. I still write letters. I encourage people to write letters. It has such an emotional impact.

“My kids won’t do that.”

“What will be lost?” I wonder.

“What is lost when you text all the time as opposed to looking up and talking to somebody? It’s the same analogy — it’s just a different way to express your personal emotions, probably no better or no worse.”

“Transactional mail — your personal correspondence, bills, invoices, receipts — it is probably going to go down to almost nothing,” agrees Kristi Kanitz, chair of the National Association of Mass Mail Users. She references an academic study that drops the guillotine on Deepest Sympathy cards in the year 2030 or so.

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“But there is another part of the mail that is strong and healthy that is often referred to as junk mail, which is a curse word in the industry,” Kanitz continues. “Marketing mail, or advertising mail, is actually strong and growing in a lot of places in the world and it is seeing a rebound post-COVID in Canada, because study after study shows that it works.

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“A lot of people feel resentful when they go to their mailbox and see advertising mail, but 96 per cent of small- to mid-sized businesses can’t afford to advertise on TV or radio. Mail has a proven return on investment. It is proven to get the attention of loyal customers and bring their business to local businesses.

“That is where we see the harm if there is no Canada Post.”

Echoing the impassioned Abdi Hagi Yusuf of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Kanitz trumpets the economically suicidal fact that a Canada Post truck has to go down every dirt road from Toronto to Tuktoyaktuk five days a week, sun, sand or snow.

“We are blessed to have urban/suburban reliable internet,” she says. “Rural and remote communities, they don’t have that luxury. Mail is the reliable way for them to get what they need.”

Kanitz casts part of the blame for Canada Post’s death spiral on what she calls “the rural moratorium since the 1980s,” during which time the ruling party in Ottawa has been loath to finally shut down at least a couple of the quaint but pointless post offices that can be found, for example, within a 35-minute drive of Plato, Sask.

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Canada’s mass mailers “believe that mail service is social policy, and the cost of social policy should not be borne by industry — it should be borne by the taxpayers of Canada.

“If the government decides that a service should be provided, then the government should pay for it. But no government to date has had the political appetite to deal with the changes that Canada Post needs. It needs to make structural changes. It needs to make massive changes.

“It’s critical. They will run out of money in 2025 … You’re in a bankrupt situation!”

Then, less vehemently: “I think it would be quite a shock if there were no mail. I still get excited when I open my mailbox. The nostalgia gets me, too.”

***

I walk into the postal franchise that is next to the food court in the basement of the shopping plaza on the northeast corner of Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. Below is the rumbling TTC subway and above is an abandoned flagship Bay department store, a fixture of the city now as spectral as Plato.

At the spotless subterranean boutique, everything is in perfect order — the Expresspost envelopes, different-sized boxes for packages, racks of Greetings From Toronto postcards, all of this year’s new secular and evangelical Christmas stamps laid out on display, ready to be affixed to cards that never will be sent. Dozens of packages that were dropped off before all the postal workers walked out are piling up in the corner, an avalanche of immobility.

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“You want to send postcard to States?” the eldering Lebanese man behind the lottery counter jibes. “Go to the airport, give it to someone who is going to States, and tell them to give it your cousin.”

The son of this impresario, whom we will call Joey, has been working alongside his father, down here in the nether regions of the mall, for 25 years, which means he started when a domestic stamp cost 46 cents and Elizabeth was our queen.

“Eventually, we’re not going to be an essential service anymore,” Joey morosely declaims. “Everybody suffers. The customer suffers. The workers suffer. Canada Post suffers.”

With personal contact comes respect. Respect for ourselves, respect for our friends, respect for our community, respect for our country. Letters are adhesive.

Garfield Portch, philatelist

There are five years left on the kiosk lease. Joey hopes Canada Post lasts that long.

“Somebody’s going to legislate them back to work,” he predicts. “I talked to every Canada Post worker who came in here — not one of them wanted to strike.

“It’s not a need anymore, so why are you raising your prices? Why do you have so many employees? Canada Post should do a big cutback on employees.

“It’s sad because they have locations on every corner, they’re like Tim Hortons. If you’re going to have so many locations, why not give the customers something they want?”

Come January, a single domestic stamp will retail for $1.44 plus GST. It will be valid “forever,” but “forever” could well arrive in 2030.

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“Twenty-five years ago, it was a necessity. It’s not a necessity anymore.” Joey shrugs.

“What happens to Joey?” I ask him. He is divorced with two kids.

“Eventually, Joey loses his job,” he replies. “A maximum five or 10 years and that’s it.

***

The Summer McIntosh of collectors of Toronto’s postal history is a retired insurance broker and former top-level soccer referee named Garfield Portch.

The “stamp room” in Portch’s apartment contains hundreds of leather-bound albums. Each album contains dozens or hundreds of pages of rare envelopes dating back to the founding of York in the 1790s. Many of these envelopes — they are called “covers” in the hobby — have won gold medals at various philatelic Olympiads and are worth thousands of dollars apiece, which is why I am not going to tell you where Portch lives.

Millions of Canadians used to collect stamps, including even union zealots like Mark Lubinski. (He has moved on to sports cards.) Now, Portch says, “A bunch of us old farts are keeping the thing going.”

Portch also collects scale-model fire engines, but the fire department is not on the verge of what Canada Post, fighting back against CUPW’s demands, calls “unsustainability.”

He reaches into a desk and extracts a variety of modern Canadian postage stamps: coils of From Far and Wide, sheets of Endangered Whales. Every one of them is a Chinese fake, available for pennies on a multitude of websites.

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Often, even when we do use the mail, the starving agency doesn’t receive a dime for all its legendary fortitude in carrying the sacks across the longitudes.

In trying to separate the genuine from the forged, Portch says, “The average person on the street doesn’t have a prayer.”

“The average person on the street doesn’t use the mail,” I retort.

When the mail ends, Portch says, “It will be a loss — a tragic loss.

“One of the great things about the postal service is the inclusiveness,” he notes. “I think it’s magic that, in a country this size, a letter can go from anywhere to anywhere for the same price.

“Email has enabled us to be impersonal, and that’s a negative. With personal contact comes respect. Respect for ourselves, respect for our friends, respect for our community, respect for our country. Letters are adhesive.”

There’s that “national glue” again.

“Sixty years from now,” I submit, “nobody will say, ‘I have an email from Justin Trudeau.”

“That’s because everybody hits the Delete button when they get something from him,” Portch responds.

A few years ago, Portch purchased a box full of old cards that had been postmarked in the Toronto area many decades before. He had repaired to his stamp room to sort through the cancellations when he came across an ugly duckling that seemed completely out of place.

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It was a postcard from 1941, franked with a 6-cent airmail stamp and rubber-stamped PASSED BY CENSOR, depicting the lobby of the Nova Scotian Hotel in Halifax, next to the railway station. (The hotel lobby remains unchanged; it’s where you board Via Rail’s Ocean to Montreal.)

“I never read the messages, that’s private,” Portch says. “I saw Halifax and I thought, ‘What the hell’s this doing in this box?’ Then I saw the address — 56 St. Anne’s Road, Toronto — and a light clicked.”

It was his childhood home. The addressee was his mother. The sender was his Dad, on the way to war.

“What are the odds of that happening?” says Portch.

What are the odds that, in a box somewhere, lost and silent, is a letter touched by your father and cradled by your Mom?

“It floored me,” says the boy from St. Anne’s Road. “It absolutely floored me. That’s the only correspondence from my father to my mother that I have. I was a biscuit in the oven when he wrote that. I didn’t see my father until I was three.

“And I shivered, a true shiver. And I wiped a tear.”

***

Back to Saskatchewan.

I haul up hungry in Netherhill on a Friday at lunchtime but Agnes Spicer’s little dinette is long gone. Vanished also are all the local shops, and the grain elevator where a man named Maury Morrison, husband of postmistress Jean, once plummeted eight storeys onto the floor but somehow was not killed.

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Here is Netherhill on the verge of extinction, like so many other prairie villages: the elevator torn down, the hockey arena condemned, the two-storey hotel by the railway tracks sagging and empty, the schoolhouse razed, the bare-gravel streets barren of traffic. About seven or eight inhabitants remain. The city of Kindersley is 10 minutes to the west, and who needs Netherhill when you have Kindersley?

A quartet of former residents have come from Brock and Rosetown to show me around the ruins of their hometown. One of them is a man named Mike Strutt, who married Jean and Maury Morrison’s daughter, Kelli.

I ask him, “What do you think will be lost if Canada Post goes out of business?”

“Nothing, really,” Strutt replies.

The Netherhill post office closed years ago. The letters from Chusovoy had stopped flying over the Iron Curtain in the early Sixties, about the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The building itself — identical in size and shape to the tiny shed that still exists in Plato — was loaded onto skids and Mike Strutt and some other guys dragged it over to a lot on 2nd Avenue and a homeowner attached it to the side of his house and used it as a playroom for his kids.

But now the add-on has been abandoned and we are standing in front of it and talking about what the mail once meant in this country, and in this gathering is the indestructible Maury Morrison, age 94.

“Maury,” I ask the postmistress’s widower with deepest sincerity, “did you ever receive a letter that changed your life?”

I envision his parents cradling crumpled papers from the Old Country, last letters from the Great War trenches, an offer of a job on the golden plains, back when the mail meant everything, back when it was all we had.

The old man thinks for a moment and says, “Only from the income tax!”

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