Thousands of homes on the North Shore of Metro Vancouver are set to lose home mail delivery in the coming months.
Canada Post announced Thursday that it is beginning the preliminary work, Canada-wide, to convert addresses that currently receive door-to-door service to community mailboxes and phase out some post offices.
For Metro Vancouver, this will affect about 23,000 homes in the City of North Vancouver, the District of North Vancouver, and West Vancouver by the end of the year or early next year, vice-president of communications John Hamilton tells 1130 NewsRadio.
On top of that, another 11,000 addresses in Abbotsford and 6,000 in Mission are on the list.
“We’re starting in areas that are relatively close to community mailboxes, so it might be a street or two over,” he said.
“We understand, though, that there’s certain areas in places like [the downtown cores of] Vancouver…Toronto, Montreal, that’s going to be more challenging. So obviously we’re not going to start there.”
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Hamilton says Canada Post is working with city planners to determine safe and accessible spots for the new community mailboxes.
“Residents will get a letter in the mail explaining to them that this is starting to happen, and once we’re at a spot where we are… confident we’ve got some good locations chosen, we’ll go out and reach out in the community and share those ideas,” he said.
“We’ll fine-tune that, and then we’ll move to installation. Conversion, getting your keys, and starting to have your mail and parcels delivered probably won’t happen until later this year or maybe early next year, just depending on how things go.”
He says only a quarter of Canadians have door-to-door service.
“So what we are doing is providing a consistent level of service, whether you live in a neighborhood with community mailboxes, or you have an apartment or a condo and you go to a mail room to get your mail, that’s a centralized form of delivery,” he said.
“So we need to move forward to kind of provide one consistent level of service.”
Hamilton says the new community mailboxes will be more secure than the ones that are already installed across the country.
“They are built for mail, but they’re also built to be a parcel locker in your neighborhood that keeps everything dry and secure.”
Hamilton says there is no list of addresses included in the first batch of those that are transitioning, but residents can check Canada Post’s website to see if their postal codes are included.
Locally, according to the website, the addresses that are affected have postal codes beginning with:
Across the country, around four million addresses are set to lose home delivery within five years.