{"id":7415,"date":"2013-12-15T11:05:13","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T16:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=7415"},"modified":"2013-12-15T11:12:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T16:12:30","slug":"canada-post-writes-its-own-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/canada-post-writes-its-own-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada Post writes its own obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"National<\/a>Headline news this week:<\/strong> Canada Post moves to end home delivery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

End home delivery?<\/em>\u00a0For me, both as \u00a0a writer, a lay historian, and growing up in an era where letters were important for communication, business, family and for art, that’s just crazy. I mean really, seriously, way-more-insane-than-the-OLG crazy. But, in an age of declining letter writing – where the tyranny of the Twitterverse is reducing our literary skills to hashtags and cryptic abbreviations- it may be inevitable.*<\/span><\/p>\n

Charlie Gillis<\/a> wrote in MacLean’s wrote about the accelerating slide to digital communication back in \u00a0March, outlining both the challenges the postal service faces and some options for its future:<\/p>\n

Robert Campbell, the author of a 2002 book on fixing postal services, led the review panel that recommended against the privatization of Canada Post. He says he suggested the reprieve, not as a permanent state of affairs, but as a temporary measure allowing the postal service to restructure to a new world of competition. \u201cYou\u2019ve got what is basically a smokestack industry here that\u2019s trying to modernize,\u201d says Campbell, currently the president of Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. \u201cIt has huge legacy costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chief among its burdens: a $4-billion pension liability owed to current and retired employees that could hobble it in the face of leaner, private-sector competitors. Ottawa owes Canada Post the time\u2014and possibly the financial assistance\u2014to deal with that overhead before opening the field to its rivals, Campbell argues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, Canada Post<\/a> has shaken the tree of its own accord, sans the intervention of Ottawa (which, given the current government and its inability to deal with the scandals in the Senate or the PMO, might be just as well).<\/p>\n

And on top of that seismic shift, CP will dramatically increase the cost of postage. So were they thinking, we’re \u00a0already losing money: let’s find another way to discourage users!<\/p>\n

\"UK<\/a>(Okay, to be fair, CP should have raised the price quite some time ago. This history of annual one-two cent increases was never a good business model given Canada’s large distances and small populations. And given the value of the penny even when it was in circulation, a jump of five cents would hardly have mattered. But until 2011, CP was making money, so maybe it never occurred to them to squirrel away a little extra for the lean years.)<\/p>\n

But what is happening to letter writing<\/em>?<\/p>\n

When I browse my book shelves I see collections of letters to and from some of the greats of history: Darwin, Einstein, Dickens, Wilde. I don’t imagine there will be many future books of great emails, great Facebook posts, or great tweets. Writing a letter takes thought, takes care, is an emotional and personal investment. Writing on social media is generally instant, immediate, thoughtless; a reflex, a reaction, not a considered act.<\/p>\n

Blogs, of course, may sometimes be considered the exception – although counter-argument might be made that many blogs are just lengthier versions of the tweet, and others are simply a platform for a more vituperative – but similarly reactive – anger than a FB post. But even a blog does not involve the same sort of contemplative act that handwriting entails, simply because the technology allows us to revise and rewrite in a way that the handwritten word does not.<\/p>\n

(Handwriting’s demise is really another topic, which I started on about months ago and now have to resuscitate that draft post to include this week’s news. On a personal note: although I blog and enjoy digital media, I also keep handwritten notebooks. Sadly, I too share the guilt in the decline of letter writing.)<\/p>\n

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Blogger Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn<\/a> wrote,<\/p>\n

Letter-writing and kindred practices that involve at least a minimal degree of contemplation, even if it is only the momentary breath before folding, sealing, stamping, addressing, and mailing a real letter, can remind someone of nothing less than the existence and importance of the inner life. They are emanations, indications, signs of an inner existence that is paradoxically the only pathway to any real connection with another person…\u00a0What if practices like letter-writing are not just signs and reminders that the inner life is real, but are preconditions for it, the very materials and means from which the inner life is forged in the first place? Or, barring that, what if they tend to produce interiority of a particular kind, nature, or quality some, if not all, of us cannot dispense with?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Social media involves a different sort of communication, even a different sort of thinking than letter writing. It also encourages brevity over lengthy narrative (something I resist, as you can tell).<\/p>\n

The Express<\/a> tells us that the UK’s Royal Mail is suffering similar decline, with people receiving an average of one letter per month. But it wasn’t always thus:<\/p>\n

Vivien Leigh, who died in 1967, was a prolific correspondent.<\/p>\n

Her diaries and some 7,500 letters have just been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum including gossipy love notes between her and Laurence Olivier and letters to Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles and Arthur Miller.<\/p>\n

Sadly there won’t be many more archives such as this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sad, indeed. Future historians<\/a> will be deprived of the treasure trove of letters that often provide them the basis of their research:<\/p>\n

Said history professor Jeffrey Nathan Wasserstrom of the University of California, Irvine: “There are indeed many ways that a decline in letter-writing will affect future historians, as many people in my profession have certainly benefited from the insights that written missives provide into how people of the past thought and felt.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What sort of legacy will electronic posters and tweeters leave for posterity? Thin gruel, as John Harris<\/a> warned in The Guardian, in 2007:<\/p>\n

If the letter really is fading fast, now might be a good time to chew over what we are about to lose. Out will go the epistolary novel. What will happen to righteous postal missives sent at the suggestion of Amnesty International, or angry screeds mailed to your MP? Whither old-school fanmail? Perhaps most importantly, what could ever replace the soppy wonderment of the old-fashioned love letter? These thoughts underline why the practice of letter-writing may turn out to be a little more resilient than the figures suggest. Somewhat surprisingly, we are apparently spending more on pens and stationery, so all may not be lost.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Newsweek<\/a> called the decline of letter writing a, “a cultural shift so vast that in the future, historians may divide time not between B.C. and A.D. but between the eras when people wrote letters and when they did not.”<\/p>\n

…where would Western civilization be without letters? For starters we wouldn’t have most of the New Testament\u2014whatever you may think of St. Paul, he was indisputably a tireless letter writer. By the 18th century, letter writing was so commonplace that one of the first prose narratives to be considered a novel, Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” was composed entirely of letters of a daughter to her parents, and the epistolary method lent that novel what realism it possessed. More contemporaneously, look to popular song for an index of just how commonplace letter writing was in our culture as late as a generation ago (“A Soldier’s Last Letter,” “Please, Mr. Postman,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” “P.S. I Love You”).\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the US, the volume seems to have dwindled to less than a trickle: about one personal letter every two months. NBC News<\/a> told us back in 2011 that the US Postal Service was facing an $8 billion loss:<\/p>\n

Last year the typical home received a personal letter about every seven weeks, according to the annual survey done by the post office. As recently as 1987 it was once every two weeks. That doesn’t include greeting cards or invitations.
\nIt’s very different from the nation’s earlier days. When Benjamin Franklin was in charge of the mail, letters bound far-flung Americans together.***<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"NationalBy 2012, that had doubled to a $16 billion loss. In response, the US Postal Service cut Saturday delivery for first class mail (although it continues parcel service). \u00a0CNN<\/a> tells us the USPS,<\/p>\n

…plans to cut 150,000 workers through 2015, reduce existing staffers’ work hours and hike the price on first-class stamps by one cent to 46 cents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The USPS seems to have had a small remission this year, thanks to a hefty increase in parcel rates, but the Washington Post<\/a> tells us it is still $40 billion in debt (in great part because the USPS has a mandatory payment every year to the US government).<\/p>\n

Looking at this from a global perspective, Canada Post’s announcement shouldn’t surprise anyone. By 2019, home mail delivery will be just a memory, like the ice man, the milk man and the bread man (all of which I have known, by the way; the ice deliveries were at the cottage, though, not in the city).<\/p>\n

But it’s not a consumer-friendly solution nor is it without serious challenges.<\/p>\n

The new postal “service” will be a drop off to a community mailbox instead of your front door. Those boxes are already common and frequent\u00a0targets for vandalism and thieves<\/a>, it turns out. In some communities (Langley, BC<\/a> for example), mail theft from common boxes is rampant. This doesn’t bode well. (FYI about a third of CP’s current mail deliveries are to households; the rest to businesses, community boxes, apartment or condo lobbies).<\/p>\n

Canada Post already knows about the problem and has taken steps to deal with it, as this report<\/a> suggests. However, the report also notes:<\/p>\n

Canada Post delivered 11 billion pieces of mail last year. Approximately 10,000 of those pieces were
\nreported stolen. However, based on the damage inflicted to the company\u2019s delivery receptacles, the
\ncompany knows that more mail is stolen than is actually reported. The fact that the mail is delivered
\nsecurely most of the time does not excuse the times when it does go missing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Postal home delivery is the earmark of a civilization arrived at modernity. Mail as an organized<\/a>, government-run system itself dates back about 2,500 years, attributed by Xenophon to Cyrus the Great. But it was under the organization of the Romans that a public mail system – cursus publicus<\/a> – that mail was firmly established as integral to the operations of both culture and government.<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2ejbgBECWEs]<\/p>\n

Canada Post was created in 1867, although the first post office<\/a> opened in Halifax in 1753. Here’s a bit of historical trivia: Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the US, opened it.<\/p>\n

Door to door postal service in Canada actually started in 1874, according to a history in the Ottawa Citizen<\/a>. Under this new plan, door-to-door delivery will be replaced by community “superboxes” – the same sort that new subdivisions have suffered with for decades.<\/p>\n

Here’s a bit of information about the volume of mail and costs from the CBC<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Canada Post serves 15.1 million addresses, but only one-third of Canadians (about five million homes) get their mail delivered to their door. Everyone else picks it up from community, apartment or rural-lot-line mailboxes.<\/p>\n

It costs Canada Post an average of about $168 per address annually to operate the mail system. Here’s a breakdown:<\/p>\n