Postal System

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Postal stations are an extension of the main post office and provide the basic services. Postal outlets or retail outlets are found in stores and businesses for the convenience of the public. In these, the owner of the business acts as the postmaster and provides a postal clerk as necessary. In rural areas of a certain density a rural delivery service is provided. In some cases community mailboxes may be set up at convenient points where customers can pick up their mail. Lock boxes are also provided in urban locations. Mail may be sent to a specific address or by general delivery to a post office to be picked up by the addressee.

As of 2015, Canada Post delivered more than 9 billion pieces of mail to 15.7 million residential and business addresses, and operated nearly 6,300 retail post offices and 21 processing plants nationwide. With postal operations representing about 80 per cent of consolidated revenues, Canada Post also owns controlling stakes in Purolator Courier, a Canadian overnight delivery company, SCI Group, which provides supply chain management services, and joint venture Innovapost, which handles the Group's computing and information systems.

Early commerce required a means of exchanging information as well as goods and services. The growth of empires required a speedy and reliable system for issuing orders, and receiving and responding to reports. Using a system of relay posts, ancient Egypt was able to send messages quickly over long distances. The Romans, with fast horses and good roads, were able to assure next-day delivery up to 280 km by post. The next great improvement came with the development of steam vehicles in the 19th century. The railways carried mail over 800 km in a day. In the 20th century, aircraft carry mail thousands of kilometres a day. With electronic facsimile transmittal (fax) by satellite, mail has been sent around the world in only a few minutes.

The modern postal system began in England with the introduction of the adhesive postage stamp by Rowland Hill in 1837. Hill also devised the uniform postage-rate schedules based on weight, rather than size, and made the prepayment of postage both possible and practical. The British government adopted Hill's system in May 1840 and its use quickly became worldwide.

When the French arrived in North America in the 16th century, messages were carried among the Indigenous inhabitants of the land by swift and trusted messengers. The French adopted the practice of using canoes between settlements along the St Lawrence River. In 1734, a road (Chemin du Roy) was opened between Québec and Montréal, and a special messenger was appointed to carry official dispatches. The messenger also carried messages for a fee. At intervals along the route, "post houses" with a "Maître de poste" were set up to receive messages and fees, and to provide conveyance to the next post.

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin was appointed as one of two deputies postmaster general for the British colonies. In 1755, Franklin organized the first regular monthly mail packet service between Falmouth, England, and New York. He opened the first official post office in Canada in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to link Halifax with the Atlantic colonies and the packet service to England. A post office for local and outgoing mail had been started by Benjamin Leigh in Halifax in April 1754.

After the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Franklin established a post office in Québec City, with subsidiaries in Montréal and Trois-Rivières. Hugh Finlay, a Scottish immigrant, became postmaster. A monthly courier service by way of Lake Champlain connected Montréal with New York and the Atlantic packet service. In 1774, Franklin was dismissed because of his sympathy with the American revolutionary cause, and Finlay became deputy postmaster general for the northern colonies. By 1775, the mails were being seriously disrupted by the revolutionaries. Finlay stopped the inland service because of the threat to the couriers’ lives. The Revolutionary War ended in 1783; and, on 7 July 1784, Hugh Finlay became the deputy postmaster general for Canada. The revolution brought a major immigration of Loyalists to Canada and a demand for improved postal services. Early in 1784, Finlay hired a courier, Pierre Durand, to pioneer a Canadian route to Halifax from Québec City through 1,000 km of forest. The round trip with the mail took 15 weeks.

By 1851 there were postmasters general in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada, but the British government still administered the postal system. The provincial deputies were convinced that they could operate the system more efficiently and petitioned Queen Victoria for a transfer of authority. The queen's approval was gazetted on 22 February 1851 and became effective 5 April 1851. From then until Confederation, the provinces co-operated in providing the mail service required, with W.H. Griffin, secretary in charge, reporting to the Honourable James Morris, postmaster general of the Province of Canada. The new decentralized, co-operative arrangement lived up to the expectation of its advocates. Rates were reduced and volumes doubled in the first year of provincial co-operation.

By 1850 sail had largely given way to steam as a reliable way to move the mail over Canada's major water routes. During the navigation season mail steamers regularly carried mail from Kingston to Montréal, and from Montréal to Québec. In 1852 these services were put on an interconnecting schedule and extended to the head of Lake Ontario to speed up the mail from Canada West. By 1865 there were mail steamboats on the Upper Great Lakes connecting Parry Sound, Collingwood, Sault Ste Marie and Fort William with the US Postal Service. A weekly steamer service also brought mail from Québec to the Gaspé Peninsula and the ports around the Gulf of St Lawrence.

In 1860 the postal department decided to establish its own Atlantic service from Montréal to Liverpool, England. The year 1861 was disastrous. The Canadian struck ice and foundered off Newfoundland on 4 June, and the North Briton went down on the Perroquet Rocks in the Gulf of St Lawrence on 5 November. New rules made the service safer, more reliable and less costly. By 1890, Canada had scheduled ocean mail services to Britain and Europe from Montréal and Halifax, to the West Indies from St John, and to China and Japan from Vancouver. A direct line to Australia calling at Honolulu and Fiji was established in 1893.

In 1899, the Canadian Development Company took over the mail service from the North-West Mounted Police and began a semi-weekly boat service between Atlin and Bennett, and between Bennett and Dawson during the navigation season in the Yukon. Postal clerks began sorting and distributing the mail en route on the Niagara-to-London (Ontario) run in 1854. By 1857 there were specially equipped cars called railway post offices cars, and the railway mail service had reduced the delivery time for a letter from Québec City to Windsor (ON) from about 10 days to a dependable 49 hours. By 1863 the trial period for the travelling post offices was over and an order-in-council established the standards for their use on the Grand Trunk Railway on 12 August 1863.

The post office was one of the first federal-government departments formed after Confederation and took over the postal service on 1 April 1868. As the Canadian Pacific Railway stretched across the prairies in the 1880s a railway post office, addressed as "End of Tracks," moved with it, bringing banking, money order and mail order facilities to the settlers. On 28 June 1886 another railway mail car left Montréal and arrived in Port Moody, British Columbia, on 4 July. It began a national mail service that was the envy of the world for 80 years. Free letter-carrier delivery service was introduced in Montréal on 1 October 1874. Free rural mail delivery began between Hamilton and Ancaster, Ontario, on 10 October 1908. Captain Brian Peck flew the first official Canadian airmail from Montréal to Toronto 24 June 1918. Two weeks later, Katherine Stinson became Canada's first woman airmail pilot when she flew 259 authorized letters from Calgary to Edmonton. Prepaid, stamped air mail was flown between Haileybury, Ontario, and Rouyn, Québec, 21 September 1924, reducing mail time between these remote northern mining towns from weeks to a few hours.

On 4 October 1927 the first contract airmail service commenced between Lac du Bonnet, Bissett and Wadhope in Manitoba. The post office also began an experimental air service (1927) to meet the ocean liners at Rimouski and fly the mail to Québec, Montréal and Ottawa. This service continued until 1939. In January 1929, famed bush pilot Punch Dickins, with engineer L. Parmenter, F. Lundy of Western Canada Airways and post office inspector T.J. Reilly, flew mail to Fort McMurray, Fort Resolution and Aklavik. In December 1929, airmail between Fort McMurray and Aklavik linked the Northwest Territories with the postal system and established a postal service some 200 km within the Arctic Circle. An airmail contract helped finance Trans-Canada Airlines in 1937. On 1 March 1939, a daily airmail service between Montréal and Vancouver began. It was extended to the Maritimes in January 1940. On 1 July 1948, Canada became the first country in the world to introduce domestic "all up" service. First-class mail was carried by air at regular postage rates.

In the 19th century steamboats and trains made it possible to carry more mail quickly over long distances, at the same time sorting it en route, thus eliminating some of the dead time and post-office handling. Mechanization of the postal transportation system brought a tremendous improvement in speed and reliability. In the 1920s the introduction of conveyor belts, elevators and gravity-feed systems greatly reduced the time and labour required to move mail within the post offices. An Alberta mailman, J.A. Lapierre, built a snow machine to deliver mail between St Paul and St Lina, Alberta, in the winter of 1923. He replaced the front wheels of a Model T Ford with skis. The front wheels were then connected in tandem with the rear wheels and a double-length set of chains went on over each pair of wheels. The enclosed cab used heat from the radiator, and the machine looked not unlike an early snowmobile. It worked so well it was used as a taxi to dances and meetings when the roads were otherwise impassable.

The introduction of the all-up airmail service, the improvement in paved roads and trucking services and a railway strike in 1950 brought about the rapid decline of the railway mail service and shifted its sortation load back into the post offices. Airmail also increased the public's expectations of the postal service. People now anticipated delivery at the speed of the airplane.

Distribution systems became more complicated as the nation grew and became urbanized, and as the composition of the mail changed. Then, in the mid-1960s, the annual examinations of distribution skills, rules and regulations were dropped, and the speed and efficiency of the manual memory sortation declined. To meet this problem the simplified alphabetic sortation, used at Christmas, was extended. It required less training, but more people, overtaxing crowded facilities and equipment. The obvious need was to mechanize the sortation process itself.

The Post Office Department first sought to simplify and streamline existing work methods and make the best of existing facilities through work simplification, measurement and standardization. This led to mechanizing the steps of the sortation process. A British-designed mechanical segregating, facing and cancelling machine, called SEFACAN, was introduced in Winnipeg, and a sortation machine from Holland, called the Transorma, was installed in Peterborough in the 1950s. The early machines were noisy and inefficient.

The Post Office Department then commissioned scientist Dr Maurice Levy to design and supervise the building of a new, electronic, computer-controlled, automatic mail sortation system for Canada. A hand-made model sorter was tested at postal headquarters in Ottawa in 1953. It worked, and a prototype coding and sortation machine, capable of processing all of the mail then generated by the City of Ottawa, was built by Canadian manufacturers and assembled in the city's Langevin Building in 1956. It could process mail at a rate of 30,000 letters per hour, with a missort factor of less than one letter in 10,000.

Visitors from around the world who came to the Universal Postal Union Congress in 1957 were impressed, but a change of government brought about the closing of Dr Levy's laboratory. Further development was contracted to Canadair, Montréal, which was unable to complete the work, and eventually the equipment was sold for scrap. In 1970 Canada Post chose a proven Belgian coding system and letter-sorting machine, and Japanese-designed, high-speed culler-facer-canceller (CFC) and optical character reader (OCR) equipment.

When a person deposits a letter in the red mailbox on the corner, the box is cleared at a scheduled time and the letter is taken by truck to the main post office where parcels, large envelopes and metered mail are separated out and the rest is sent to be cancelled. Mail addressed to the community in which it was posted is sorted by street names into letter-carrier routes or sent to postal stations for the letter carriers, who sort it by street and house number for delivery. The letter carrier takes about 16 kg at a time in their bag. The rest is taken by truck to relay boxes at convenient places along the letter carrier's route. Large parcels are delivered by drivers. Mail addressed to places outside the community is sorted, packaged and sent to the country, city or distribution centre for that address. There it is sorted again and put into boxes to be picked up, turned over to the letter carriers or rural mail couriers for delivery to the addressee.

Starting in Ottawa in 1972, the post office installed equipment to mechanize the sortation process. The system is based on a six-character postal code, which forms the last line of every address. This postal code is made up of alphabet letters and numbers, arranged in the order ANA NAN. The first group, ANA, represents a geographic area; the second group, NAN, is a local code that may identify a street, an apartment building or a group of rural post offices. Mail brought into a mail processing plant (MPP) is unloaded, dropped onto a conveyor and taken to a bag shake-out machine. There it is shaken out and taken by a conveyor to a culling station where oversize, undersize and non-acceptable articles are removed to be sorted manually. The mail then goes to a culler-facer-canceller (CFC) where it is culled again if it does not meet machine standards of size and thickness. The machine then faces up the remainder and the stamp is located by a photoelectric cell that triggers its cancellation. Letters are then stacked in coded trays and sent to a temporary storing system from which a computer dispatches them to the next step according to a scheduling program.

The next step may be an optical character reader (OCR), which locates and reads typed or printed codes and applies a coloured-bar code that actuates a letter-sorting machine (LSM). As many as 30,000 letters an hour can be sorted into the LSM's destination bins. Addresses that cannot be identified by the OCR are rejected and sent to the group desk suite (GDS) where the code is read by an operator who keys the coloured-bar code onto the letter by hand. Uncoded or indecipherable coded letters are rejected at the GDS and sent to manual sorters. Both the OCR and the GDS take care of the primary sortation of the mail and add the bar codes for the final sortation by the LSM.

Mail that does not meet the standards, or does not bear the code legibly printed, has to be separated out of the main flow. Large envelopes or magazines, called flats, are sent to flat-sorting machines (FSM) for processing. Small parcels and small objects also have their own sorting system. An operator indicates their postal code to a computer, which directs them to a mechanism that sorts them according to their destination. Standard mail, parcels, large envelopes or manually-sorted mail come together in a consolidation area where mail for a particular destination is assembled and packaged for transport by conveyor or fork lift to the dispatching dock. Local mail goes out to the postal stations by shuttle trucks for delivery. Forward mail goes by truck to other post offices or to the airmail facility (AMF) for shipment to other cities or countries.

The Universal Postal Union is an international organization that facilitates the exchange of mail between nations. It is a forum in which countries can discuss and work out problems that interfere with the free flow of mail among them. It originated in Berne, Switzerland, in 1874, and Canada became a member in 1878. The Universal Postal Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations, made up of 192 member countries comprising a single postal territory. Freedom of transit for postal items is guaranteed throughout the union territory. Canada is also a member of the Postal Union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (PUASP) in which it has played an active role.

Canada Post became the Canada Post Corporation on 16 October 1981. Deputy Postmaster General J.C. Corkery was replaced by President R. Michael Warren, reporting to a board of directors chaired by Justice R.J. Marin. The assistant deputies were replaced by executive vice-presidents and vice-presidents, and the crown corporation was reorganized along divisional lines.

Collective bargaining is, under the rules of the Canada Labour Code, administered by the Canadian Industrial Relations Board and Employment and Social Development Canada. The Canadian Union Of Postal Workers (CUPW) represents over 51,000 members divided into 208 locals (2016), working as rural and suburban mail carriers, letter carriers, mail service couriers, postal clerks, mail handlers, mail despatchers, technicians, mechanics, electricians and electronic technicians. CUPW also represents cleaners, couriers, drivers, vehicle mechanics, warehouse workers, mail house workers, emergency medical dispatchers, bicycle couriers and other workers in more than 15 private sector bargaining units.

Canada Post faces significant challenges, including difficulties in the area of labour relations that have led to lockouts and strikes. It has also had to deal with problems associated with embracing the digital revolution while building on its core strength, which is the ability to match the flow of digital information with a parallel flow of physically-represented goods including print material. Looking to the burgeoning e-commerce market as its salvation, Canada Post is working to resolve cost structure challenges that inevitably accompany new technologies.

As the inbox replaces the mailbox and physical letter mail in Canada drops significantly, Canada Post is modernizing to stay competitive, manage changing volumes and market demands, and position itself for future growth. Canada Post is investing in a Postal Transformation to upgrade equipment, vehicles, and computer systems, including new generation mail-processing equipment and systems, new ergonomic fuel-efficient vehicles, and newly designed carts and containers for moving the mail safely through facilities.

New delivery models include equipment to pre-sequence the majority of letter mail according to the delivery agent's line of travel along the route. Delivery agents are equipped with portable data terminals providing real-time access to communication services; for example, the ability to update delivery information for parcel tracking and confirmation of incorrect customer addresses. Integrated web services link directly into businesses' e-commerce platforms, websites, and custom applications using proprietary APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), enabling online stores, e-commerce platforms and developers to add real-time shipping, tracking, estimates, pickups and returns directly into platforms, websites and custom applications.

Launched in 2000, the free-of-charge "personal, digital mailbox" ePost was the first bill consolidator in Canada. With more than 7.5 million subscribers as of 2016, the service offers subscribers a single online location with one login and password to manage household bills and essential documents, and is fully integrated with Canada's seven major banks. A new "vault" system, allows individuals and businesses to store documents like bills, receipts, tax returns, bank statements for up to seven years for a fee. Files are encrypted and are protected by bank-grade security in level three data centres featuring disaster-recovery replication, off-site backups and multiple redundant independent power supplies.

Canada Post handled nearly 1.2 billion fewer pieces of mail in 2013 than in 2006. Citing rising costs and falling mail volumes, Canada Post announced in 2013 a plan to phase out door-to-door delivery and cut up to 8,000 jobs as part of its strategy to compete in an increasingly digital market. Delivery to the one-third of Canadians receiving mail at their doors was to be replaced by community mailboxes. The changeover, slated to begin in the summer of 2014, with full implementation by 2019, was expected to save up to $500 million annually by 2019.

Seen by many to be a precursor to privatization, the decision faced fierce opposition and protest in several cities, and raised questions and concerns about diminished service, safety and convenience experienced by customers, especially seniors and people with disabilities. Complaints by frustrated residents concerned with increased traffic and litter surrounding community mailboxes prompted Canada Post to change the location of more than 700 new boxes.

In October 2015, Canada Post announced that it would temporarily suspend the community mailboxes conversion process in the wake of a campaign pledge by prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau to reverse cuts to the agency. As of early 2016, efforts were underway to halt the process involving roughly 460,000 addresses across the country, which were in the process of being converted to community mailboxes. In neighbourhoods where the conversion was already completed customers will continue to collect mail at the community boxes.