MONCTON – 36-year-old Moncton resident Aaron Landry expressed confusion late Monday evening after opening his empty mailbox for the sixth time in a row, uncertain if his lack of mail was due to a series of his own life choices or a Canada Post strike that may or may not be happening.
“I think I maybe read somewhere that Canada Post was going on strike again? Maybe on a news alert on my phone? Does that sound familiar to anyone else?” asked Landry. “But then again, election season is over, I haven’t received a physical letter in the mail since the Cambodian penpal I wrote to four times in grade three, and every time I sign up for some new service I mash the ‘send me digital statements’ button so hard I get a thumb bruise, so it’s possible I just don’t really get any mail. Impossible to say.”
“I peeled the ‘no flyers’ sticker off my mailbox just to test if the mail was coming, but there’s been nothing,” said Landry. “So then I thought maybe we’d just put an end to spam, somehow, so I started answering text messages from unknown numbers. Now I’m two weeks into a long-distance relationship with a woman who constantly asks me for photos of the front and back of my credit cards, and I still don’t know if my Amazon packages are coming or not.”
Canadians in other parts of the country echoed Landy’s sentiments.
“The only thing I got in the mail this month was a couple of Amazon packages, and I don’t even think those are delivered by Canada Post? I think it’s like a separate Amazon guy, maybe?” said 27-year-old Burnaby resident Anika Kumar. “I could Google this information at any time but I am just not going to.”
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers, who represent the mail carriers employed by Canada Post, put out a statement to clear up the confusion.
“95% of our members voted that they would authorize a strike starting last week if we asked them two days from now,” said CUPW President Jan Simpson. “So we are advising Canadians to prepare for the possibility of mail service disruption in the near or perhaps immediate future, depending on whether the talks scheduled for tomorrow go better or worse than the outcome of yesterday’s talks originally scheduled for last week that have been postponed until Thursday.”
When reached for comment, Canada Post promised to send out a press release on the situation early next week, and plan to do so via email, just in case the mail isn’t really running right now.
