Every Christmas season, Elizabeth Teasdale sets aside an entire room in her house on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia to store presents for her family’s large holiday gathering. By now, 20 to 30 packages should be stashed away.
This week there were two.
It has not been the most wonderful time of the year.
A strike by more than 50,000 postal workers in Canada is now in its fourth week, threatening to leave empty spaces under many Christmas trees.
After nearly a month without mail, Steven MacKinnon, the federal labor minister, said Friday that he had asked the independent Canada Industrial Relations Board to order strikers back to work if it determines the two sides are at an impasse.
“Canadians are rightly fed up,” he told reporters, adding that service might return as early as next week.
A wide swath of Canadian residents and businesses has been affected. But the hardest hit have been those in remote communities like Ms. Teasdale’s town of Inverness, where Canada Post is the only delivery option. Even Amazon relies on it.
“We can use our sense of humor, call it a piece of our new reality,” Ms. Teasdale said. “We got around Covid and will get around this. It is what it is, I guess.”
For some people in areas with no service other than the post office, the strike’s effects are potentially much more serious than missing Christmas gifts.
National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak of the Assembly of First Nations, the country’s largest association of Indigenous groups, urged the federal government to impose an end to the walkout, citing a potential health threat. Many Indigenous people live in the most remote and sparsely populated stretches of the vast country.
“Many of our citizens rely entirely on Canada Post for access to prescription medications, medical equipment, and health care supplies,” National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak said in a statement.
A federal mediator said earlier in the week that talks between the postal service and its union were heading in the wrong direction.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canada Post remain far apart on wages and other issues, particularly a plan by the post office to use more part-time workers to expand weekend parcel delivery rather than paying full-time employees overtime.
The post office has offered an 11.5 percent wage increase over four years, which the union has rejected. Instead, the union has reduced its demand over the same period from 24 percent to 19 percent. Canada Post, which faces chronic financial problems, has said it cannot afford such a raise.
Like many Canadians, Ms. Teasdale is fast giving up hope that mail service will be restored in time for Christmas shipping. She also does not expect an Amazon order she placed before the walkout to show up before Dec. 25.
Amazon said in a statement that “only a small percentage” of orders placed by Canadians are delivered through Canada Post.
The company added that it had “taken measures to minimize customer impact,” but offered no details.
Ms. Teasdale has had to come up with a Plan B.
One of the parcels in her gift room, with two T-shirts, arrived only because she paid an online retailer to ship them to a community at the end of the line for various parcel and courier delivery companies.
From there, she also paid a local courier company, “one of those little local vans,” to take care of the final leg of the journey to her house. The total shipping cost? About 50 Canadian dollars, or $35, she estimates.
Like many people in her community, Ms. Teasdale will probably ask neighbors who are traveling for the holidays to become good Samaritan gift couriers. People who have the time and can afford it, she said, are also making the eight-hour round trip to the provincial capital of Halifax to shop.
And many others, Ms. Teasdale said, are making the best of a challenging situation by turning the clock back to the days when the gifts people exchanged were homemade. Baking and cooking have become particularly popular these days.
“My neighbor was here the other day looking for Mason jars,” she said.
But some things still must be shipped. About 25 miles away in Margaree Valley, Anne Morrell Robinson and her husband, Joel, who hold Canadian and American citizenship, needed to send tax forms to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
They set off with an envelope on a two-and-a-half hour drive to a FedEx drop-off located in an office supply store.
Once there, she said, a clerk struggled, but ultimately managed to enter the shipping information correctly into a computer. Then came the bad news.
“The courier services have all shut down for 48 hours because they’re so overwhelmed,” Ms. Robinson, said referring to FedEx and Purolator, a courier firm owned by Canada Post, which it operates separately. The tax envelope came home with them.
Like the U.S. Postal Service, Canada Post is in dire financial shape. It has lost more than 3 billion Canadian dollars (or about $2.1 billion) since 2018 and has warned that it may run out of cash early next year.
The pandemic and the extraordinary surge in e-commerce did yield a significant windfall for the post office, with parcel deliveries rising by 50 percent in 2020. But that windfall has largely disappeared because of new competitors.
Ian Lee, a business professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who was once a financial analyst at Canada Post, said that the postal service has lost most of the parcel delivery business to smaller services that rely on gig workers — who receive no benefits and, in some cases, use their own vehicles.
“We are not going back to the old economy of file cabinets and letters and checks in the mail,” Professor Lee said. “That’s what’s vanishing, literally, before our eyes. So then the question is: What do we put in its place?”
For Ms. Robinson, a professional quilt maker, the tax envelope is not the only thing affected by the strike. She decided that her customers, who are largely in the United States and overseas, would recoil at the rates charged by FedEx. So she suspended shipping.
“There’s so many benefits to living in a rural community, but this is not one of them,” she said. “It’s a sad situation.”
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