Harrowsmith Residents Feel Overlooked by Canada Post

Jemma Dooreleyers | Feb 14, 2024

Frontenac County residents are no stranger to the nuisance of winter weather. Bus and event cancellations, slick back-road driving conditions, and power outages are all things rural residents expect when hunkering down for Canadian winter.

Harrowsmith residents are no exception to this, and for almost two decades, when the cold hits, they mentally prepare for one more hindrance - access to their mail.

Located on the perimeter of Harrowsmith’s Centennial Park, up a hill and along a narrow road, unprotected against the elements, lives a unit of community mailboxes, used by almost 400 residents. If you are unlucky enough to have a north facing mailbox, it’s almost a guarantee that your mail box will be iced over after every snow fall or freezing rain. A south facing mailbox gives you slightly better odds, but only slightly. If it is raining, it doesn’t matter if you’re facing the north side or the south side, the mail will be wet.

Since 2006, people have brought lighters, screw drivers and shovels with them, simply to get into their mailboxes.

This winter is not an outlier.

It was January 25, 2024, Harrowsmith’s Brenda Crawford, received an email from her nephew saying that, once again, the community mailboxes in Centennial Park were empty and no one had received mail for three to four days.

Crawford had noticed that her mailbox was empty as well but had assumed she just didn’t have anything in the mail. After she made a few phone calls to friends, it was confirmed that they also hadn’t received their mail.

It wasn’t until Crawford made her way to Verona Post Office (a 14 KM round-trip journey) that she was told that the courier hadn’t been able to open the main unit due to a build-up of de-icing salt in the lock and that they were not able to deliver mail because of this. No notices had been posted.

Although it’s nothing they’re not used to, Harrowsmith residents would have appreciated notification as soon as the mail delivery was suspended, said Crawford.

“The thing is we were in the dark,” she said. “It’s 2024 and social media is such that Canada Post could have made a phone call and informed the residents that their mail delivery was temporarily suspended. Instead people had to wait over a week to realize they hadn’t received their mail.”

Verona Post Office is 7km up Road 37 and is dangerous, if not impossible to access without a car, she added

“There are seniors who live alone who don’t drive,” said Crawford. “They are at the mercy of neighbours and word of mouth in order to get their mail.”

Due to Verona’s hours of operation (9 am-5pm Monday to Friday, with a lunch break from noon -2pm, and Saturday from 9am -12noon), working families are also finding it difficult to access their mail.

Noting that tax season is around the corner and there is a high concentration of Harrowsmith residents who who rely on paper mail as their main form of communication with the federal government and other important entities, Crawford said she is deeply concerned for the well-being of her community and feels left behind and overlooked by Canada Post’s lack of concern for the state of their mailboxes.

“It has made everybody feel very uncomfortable and very overlooked,” she said. “It makes me feel like we are third class citizens.”

Since before the mailboxes were installed, community members have been looking for solutions to the location of the community boxes.

In 1991, after Canada Post de-commisioned many rural post offices, Mary and Laurie Greenidge (the current owners of the Harrowsmith Business Centre) bought the Harrowsmith Business Centre to operate the post outlet along with handling accounting, bookkeeping and tax returns.

People could pick up their mail and purchase mail related items. In 2006, Canada Post moved that outlet to Hartington (residents can send mail from Hartington but cannot receive) and mail sorting and distribution was relocated to Verona.

Despite a large town meeting that filled St. Paul’s Anglican church to persuade Canada Post not to set up the community boxes in Centennial Park, Canada Post went ahead and installed the boxes there in 2006.

According to Greenidge, Centennial Park is an unsafe and inconvenient location for many reasons.

“It is isolated, dark, uphill, a difficult walk for the elderly, especially,” she mentioned in an email. “In the winter the boxes are not well maintained, and the snow is not removed in a timely manner, and the boxes often freeze up.”

The Greenidges have offered to take the community boxes back into their building.

“The building is located across the street from the current mailboxes, has a parking lot, is easy to access by sidewalk, is well-kept and has a space for mailboxes, they said. However, the Greenidges were told that putting the mailboxes back would be against Canada Post policy.

Greenidge feels that this further proves that Canada Post has no regard for their rural clients.

“We received much support from the community for this and we were disappointed with (Canada Post’s) response,” she said. “It appears to me that Canada Post does not care about rural residents … the people of Harrowsmith want our post office back.”

Crawford has also tried to implement a permanent solution.

In 2012, she was elected as the Chair of Harrowsmith’s Beautification Commitee and by that time, residents had already had enough of battling the elements for their mail.

She spoke with every hardware store in the surrounding area and sourced a pavilion that would be made from donated materials and donated labour. The pavilion would be built with no cost to Canada Post or the township and would provide a shelter for the boxes to ensure access year-round, as well as motion activated lights to provide safety. When she proposed this idea to council, for a reason unknown to Crawford, this request was denied as well.

This year, it wasn’t until after she spoke with MP Scott Reid’s assistant, called Canada Post twice and spoke to different news stations, that Canada Post put up paper notices telling residents to pick up their mail in Verona (one of the three signs remained due to winter conditions) and put in a work order to repair the locks.

After trying to clean out the de-icing salt from the locks to no avail, Canada Post put in another work order to replace the locks at the end of the second week in Februrary, three weeks from when Crawford first noticed that she wasn’t receiving mail.

In response to a media request from Frontenac News, Canada Post’s representative reiterated that the malfunctioning locks were due to a build-up of de-icing salt and sand and explained that they have put in a work order.

“This is an unfortunate situation and we apologize to customers who have been affected,” a media representative said in an email.

They did not respond to any questions about why the community boxes are located where they are, why residents were not initially notified when their mail delivery was suspended and what Canada Post is doing to ensure that residents of Harrowsmith can access their mail year-round.

MP Scott Reid, the federal representative of Harrowsmith, was not available to comment on the matter.

To Crawford, this will not end when the locks are replaced. She does not want to accept what she called “another band-aid solution”.

In order to be satisfied with the community boxes remaining where they are, Crawford suggests installing a cover over the rows of boxes as well as a sidewalk so people no longer have to walk along the narrow road.

“Canada Post has provided a band-aid solution to our mailboxes for now,” she said. “This situation will happen again. It is not if it will be a problem, it is when it will be a problem … this is not over for our villagers.”