As most Langford residents will surely know by now, Canada Post has selected the city to be one of the eight municipalities across B.C. involved in their 2015 community mailbox expansion.
Canada Post spokesperson Anick Losier says residents of 4,488 Langford addresses who currently receive door-to-door delivery will be heading to a nearby corner to pick it up as of this fall.
Added to the 5,037 addresses currently served by community mailboxes, the move will almost double the coverage to 9,525.
Losier says a community survey was sent out late last year to addresses expected to be affected by the change, to help the corporation better implement the program, including determining where the new mailboxes should be located.
“We have a set of criteria – after all, we’ve been doing CMBs for over 30 years,” she says.
“But we seek input from the municipality itself as well as the affected residents via a survey … to help us best understand their concerns and adjust any site locations accordingly.”
From the beginning of the newest round of community mailbox implementation, Canada Post has emphasized there will not be staffing cuts due to the change.
“Any reduction in the number of positions (will) be done by attrition,” Losier says.
“We have an aging workforce and over 15,000 of our employees are scheduled to retire within the next five years. We’re estimating that about 6,000 to 7,000 positions will be eliminated (over that time).”
Based on simple math, that means the corporation could actually be hiring for over 7,000 available positions over that same time frame.