Council urged to support postal banking services

Craig Bakay | May 16, 2018

Postal banking would be one way of providing more services to rural postal areas, protecting rural postal outlets and providing banking outlets to communities who don’t have banks, Diane Mitchell, national campaign coordinator for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers told North Frontenac Council at its regular meeting last Friday in Plevna.

“Banks are closing in rural municipalities,” she said. “We had banking at the Post Office until 1967.”

In January of 2014, Canada Post began a program which planned for the removal of door-to-door mail deliver from all residential addresses across Canada, she said.

“Between then and the 2015 federal election, 830,000 addresses lost home delivery,” she said.

She said that CUPW has received broad support for expanded services at postal outlets including postal banking, senior check-in service, electric charging station and internet services.

“It has been noted that 29 per cent of Canadians would ‘probably or most definitely’ use a postal bank,” she said. “One hundred and eighty-three of 201 countries have financial services through a postal bank and 1 billion people hold a chequing account in a post office.”

She said CUPW is asking rural municipalities to send letters of support for postal banking to Minister Carla Qualtrough.

She also drew Council’s attention to a report, The Way Forward, that was created by The Standing Committee on Government Operations following hearings in 22 communities.

While the 185 page report made 45 recommendations, Mitchell noted four they’d like to see adopted:

• Continue the moratorium on community mailbox conversions and develop a plan to reinstated door-to-door delivery for communities that were converted after Aug. 3 2015

• Canada Post review the impact on efficiency of delivery before implementing strategies such as local processing vs centralized processing

• Canada Post examine ways to provide more services and meet service level commitments in all types of communities using its existing retail network

• Canada Post explore location-specific opportunities for post offices to act as a community hub and respond to the local needs of its surrounding community.