An ongoing review of on-the-job safety for rural mail carriers is not a disguised attempt to cut rural mail service, Canada Post said Thursday.
The federal mail carrier issued a statement “to firmly dispel any misconceptions that might have arisen, from recent media reports or other sources, about the future of rural mail delivery.”
Its review, it said, “is aimed at providing our rural and suburban mail carriers (RSMC) a workplace free of undue risk.”
Canada Post delivers mail directly to about 843,000 rural mailboxes in Canada. In recent months it has shut down delivery to a reported 14,000 addresses, mostly in the eastern provinces, and plans to reassess the rest of Canada’s rural mailboxes according to its safety criteria.
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Canada Post said it has received “over 1,300” workplace safety complaints from rural and suburban mail carriers (or RSMCs, as the corporation refers to them in its statement), noting RSMCs have been involved in 68 accidents since January 2004.
Each day, the corporation said, the country’s 6,600 RSMCs “pull their vehicles over at each rural mailbox, deposit the mail and then merge back into traffic to proceed to the next address. Increased traffic volumes, the nature of roads (narrow or no shoulder), visual obstructions like curves and hills, are just some of the conditions that increase the risk of accident during mail delivery.”
Since an RSMC repeats that sequence over 100 times on each mail route every day, “the probability of an accident increases exponentially,” especially when their views become blocked by snowbanks in winter, Canada Post wrote.
“Wherever needed we install and maintain community mailboxes within short distances of customers’ homes,” Canada Post said, but it only considers changing the mode of delivery when a carrier’s safety is in question and a mailbox can’t be relocated.
The corporation also stressed that the safety review is not a cost-cutting measure, noting the review and finding other avenues to keep serving rural mailboxes could together cost Canada Post up to $500 million over the next five years.
Canada Post’s statement followed, among other reports in recent months, a news story the previous day about the high failure rate among mailboxes in rural and suburban areas around Fredericton, N.B., against the corporation’s roadside safety standards. The Canadian Press news agency said nearly half of over 2,500 mailboxes in the area fell below those standards.
