The last
time I lived in Canada, I reeived dozens of Government
Letters monthly as did most people. Where does all this mail come? Here are some places:
Medical plans
Tax plans, federal
Tax plans, provincial
Unemployment insurance
Social security, low income
Social security, older people
Educational
loans
Educational courses
Car vehicles department
Various unions of the government
It was estimated that one in five Canadians worked for the government,
which is really a lot of people.
All of this mail has no real stamps on it, they are stamped with machine
stamps to save time and money on printing postage.
***
Yet
my first memories of Canada Post were full of feeling and
anticipation.
Especially at Christmas when every
day beginning in early December brought real letters dropping through
the front door slot.
As
Christmas drew nearer, sometimes
there were so many letters that the mail made a delightful thud when it
hit the front hall
floor. No government mail at all.
Every single envelope contained messages of warmth, love, and affection
from
friends and relatives in places with
names like Horseshoe Bay, or Bobycaygeon, or West Vancouver.
The
letters were all shapes and sizes,
mostly white, but some pale blue,
some heavy off white and some papery air mail aqua. At CHristmas it was
molstly cards, yet
many held a letter as well, and
these letters were to be held back, until we put on a fresh potof
percolating coffee, awaited
the Pom Bakery Truck man, and sat
down to pour over every line from our aunts and uncles and cousins and
grandparents who
lived hundreds and thousands of
miles away in the Canada we knew then.
Then
the postal stamps rates began
rising. It's hard to believe that
could change our plentitude of correspondence, yet it did. Around the
day that I was born,
my parents received 33 Baby
Congratulation cards and letters from all over the country. People
cherished these real letters.
They counted them, and stuck them
with LePage Glue into scrapbooks that they bought at Woolworth's.
The
post office raised rates, to have
less business, to hire more workers, to send out more mail of its own.
That does not
make Logical Sense?
Welcome to the world of federal spending!