A week into a strike by postal workers in Canada, a sense of disconnection was setting in at the village of Fort Simpson, in the Far North of Canada.
Many Canadian urban dwellers, with access to several other delivery options, have mostly shrugged off the strike that began on Sept. 25 and are unfazed by the prospect that Canada Post, the long-ailing, government-owned postal service, could be radically shrunk.
But for communities like Fort Simpson, the postal service is essential, and for a lot more than just letters.
Medication, spare parts and business supplies all arrive by mail delivered only by Canada Post, brought in by truck and plane, weather permitting — and, sometimes, the weather does not permit.
At the small local post office, 860 postal boxes hold everyone’s mail, and residents make their way there to collect larger parcels and send their own.
For Crystal Marshall, Canada Post is the key to her livelihood. She uses 3-D printing, laser cutting and crocheting to make crafts such as decorative items, as well as T-shirts for companies, all out of her home in Fort Simpson.
But the strike means she can’t get the supplies she needs to keep going.
“It completely disrupts my small business income,” Ms. Marshall said, “and we will be in trouble as a community if it continues.”
During a Canada Post strike that started last November and lasted until December, Ms. Marshall was unable to receive the materials she needed to make items to sell at Christmas markets — the pinnacle of her year’s work. She missed the season, and a significant part of her annual income.
So, too, did Indigenous elders in the community who make traditional crafts to sell, she said.
Fort Simpson, a tidy cluster of homes on an island at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers amid lush boreal forest, is, by many measures, tiny and remote — a community of roughly 1,100 an hour’s flight away from the capital of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife.
But in the ecosystem of the Canadian North, which is dotted with even smaller hamlets and communities of just a handful people living above the 60th parallel, Fort Simpson, with its police station, bank and post office, is actually a vital hub. It serves as the nearest point for essential retail, banking and medical services for Sambaa K’e, Nahanni Butte and other communities reachable predominantly by air.
The embattled Canada Post is a core part of what connects these remote places and their residents to one another, to vital services and to the rest of Canada, the world’s second-largest nation by landmass after Russia.
Prime Minister Mark Carney was elected this year on a promise to defend Canada’s sovereignty and knit closer the vast territory, much of which is largely uninhabited, amid President Trump’s claims over the country.
Providing services to all Canadians is seen as a state obligation, and many also want to ensure that Indigenous people can continue to live on their ancestral lands, wherever they are, with Canada Post playing a key role keeping them connected to the rest of country.
But it’s also a sovereignty issue, some say.
“I think that the strongest assertion of sovereignty is having strong communities,” said the leader of the Northwest Territories, Premier R.J. Simpson, in an interview in Yellowknife.
Canada Post is in a protracted existential crisis, hampered by collapsing mail volumes and competition from private companies with fewer labor protections.
It has needed billions in taxpayer-funded cash injections to continue operating, and the current government wants to cancel door-to-door delivery for million of homes, consolidate services and shut down some rural post offices to reduce costs.
Such cuts would probably lead to major layoffs among the service’s 68,000 employees, and members of the labor union representing postal workers walked off the job after the government announced its proposed cutback in services.
The turmoil bodes ill for the fragile network of nodes linking Fort Simpson and other remote communities to the rest of Canada.
Sergei Mjatelski has been anxiously waiting for the strike to end so he can receive vital spare parts for his business. A bush pilot, Mr. Mjatelski owns and operates Goose Flying, a small airline that serves the fly-in communities around Fort Simpson and takes tourists to the nearby Nahanni National Park.
Mr. Mjatelski relies on Canada Post for the parts to keep his planes in good working condition. And others, in turn, depend on Mr. Mjatelski.
He delivers the mail to communities in even harder-to-reach locations and, because there is extra space on his mail flights, also takes groceries and other necessities on postal runs.
All this is now on pause.
Herb Norwegian, the Dehcho First Nations grand chief and a key community leader in Fort Simpson, was cleareyed about the postal service’s challenges. “We need to learn how to do more things online like our banking and government correspondence, use technology,” he said.
But, he added, that is likely to lead to cuts to other services Canada Post provides in the Far North as the final-leg delivery service for virtually everything.
Muaz Hassan, who owns an inn, a diner and a convenience store in Fort Simpson, said he was concerned that a prolonged postal strike, or longer-term changes in the way mail and parcels are delivered here by Canada Post, could deepen a feeling of abandonment for residents.
Fort Simpson gets regular reminders of just how cut off it is. In the past few weeks, a wildfire that is still burning parts of the boreal forest around Fort Simpson affected the fiber optics, leaving the village offline.
Last year, droughts lowered the water levels of the Mackenzie River so drastically that a barge that brings trucks across the river to the island the village sits on could not operate. That left people, vehicles and goods on both sides stranded for days.
“The federal and territorial governments are already neglecting this region,” Mr. Hassan said, “and I worry with the situation with the post, that people will feel even more cut off and forgotten.”
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.
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