Hundreds of community mailboxes are set to be installed throughout central Ottawa, despite unaddressed concerns over accessibility and privacy.
The change comes as part of Canada Post’s ongoing Five-Point Action Plan.
The plan aims to phase out urban door-to-door delivery across the country by 2019.
It will be replaced with the community box system used in rural areas – all in an effort to address the Crown corporation’s financial issues.
For as many as 20,000 Centretown residents, that service could be discontinued as early as this year.
Many feel the process is leaving residents out in the cold.
“It’s ridiculous,” says Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar. “Such a big change is being implemented without any real consultation with the people actually being affected.”
“After polling my constituents, only three out of 400 were in favour of having community mailboxes, despite claims that extensive consultation was being done,” Dewar says.
“Even those with properties designated for a mailbox are only being told through mail after the decision is arbitrarily made.”
He says that there are significant issues with installing the “superboxes” in densely populated areas that were not designed to accommodate them, as opposed to newer developments such as Kanata, which were planned with community mailboxes in mind.
One such issue is accessibility. Many areas, especially in the downtown core, do not have the safe sidewalks or infrastructure in place for residents who will have to walk to a community mailbox.
“Being in the downtown core where we have seniors, where we have people who are disabled, is very different than being in – let’s say – Kanata,” says Dewar. “They require certain services, and a basic service would be having someone come to their door to deliver mail.”
“The situation is going from bad to worse for someone like me, who already needs help just getting to the mailbox at the end of my driveway,” says Neal Norris, a resident on a tiny one-way street off of Bronson Avenue.
“They said that there will be readily-available help for disabled people like myself, but so far I haven’t seen or heard of any sort of plan being put in place.”
Another major issue is the privacy and security of these community mailboxes, as thousands of incidents have been reported throughout communities that have already made the switch.
According to a CBC investigation, the majority of the incidents between 2008 and 2013 involve theft and vandalism, with sprees of activity coinciding with tax return time when personal information is delivered to the boxes.
“It’s a scary thought, that some people are deliberately targeting these mailboxes to steal your money and identity,” says Joel Mugford, a resident of Kanata who has been using the community mailboxes for the last year.
“The superbox that I’ve been assigned to has been vandalized a couple times, but nothing too major,” he says. “Still, you have to think twice about whether or not they are really as safe as you want them to be.”
Around 8,000 residents in Kanata were transferred to the community mailbox program last year and Canada Post expects to convert delivery for 50,000 residents in Ottawa in 2015.