By Lara Fominoff @fomsy1 on Twitter

City of Lethbridge to write letter to Federal Government supporting postal workers

Jul 18, 2017 | 11:39 AM

LETHBRIDGE – The average Canadian doesn’t generally send letters often, if at all anymore– but sending and receiving  parcels, big and small, and birthday cards is huge.

And delivering millions of them every year, are Canada Post workers.
 
At Monday’s City Council meeting, former CUPW President and retired Postal Worker Ken Sears along with Barb McNeely-Sears, made a presentation to Council members, asking them to join dozens of other towns, cities and municipalities to support the implementation of 45 recommendations contained in a December 2016 Federal Standing Committee Report on the future of the Crown Corporation.
 
“Canada Post, almost four years ago, embarked on a program to do away with residential door to door delivery right across Canada. Lethbridge escaped that basically with just a matter of luck and timing, because there was a Federal Election called.”
 
But about half a dozen other communities in Alberta, didn’t escape the cuts.
 
Sears says since then, the Federal Government put together a committee to look at postal issues. A decision on implementing the recommendations was supposed to be made by Judy Foote, the Minister in Charge of Canada Post this spring, but it still hasn’t occurred.
 
One of them includes reinstating door-to-door delivery service for those homes and neighborhoods that lost it over the last few years.
 
“The post office is an infrastructure, the post office is a service,” Sears explains. “We are of the opinion that some of the other recommendations speak to the survival of small, rural communities in this country. Speak to the health of the health of Lethbridge as an economy as well.”
 
He says postal workers don’t want the report to be “lost” so that Canada Post can “go on doing whatever Canada Post pleases.”
 
“Most people don’t want door-to-door taken away. Most people don’t want their small town post offices shut down. Most people don’t want hours cut down in the post office.”
 
Lethbridge City Council passed a motion Monday, joining a growing number of councils across the country, to send a letter to the minister, calling for the implementation of the recommendations.