It was news the members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 129 have been fighting to hear for more than a year.
They broke into a round of applause and hugs.
The Crown corporation’s controversial plan to halt door-to-door mail delivery nationwide and move everyone to a community mailbox system has been put on hold, with no word on when, if ever, the rollback of the service will be restarted.
It was a sweet moment for Scott Gaudet, past president of local union, and his fellow letter carriers.
“It’s just a great relief knowing that we dodged a bullet on the cuts,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of stress on the shop floor in Summerside, just not knowing and Canada Post not being forthcoming about it,”
Charlottetown finds itself in the position of having switched over to the community mailboxes the same day the postponement was announced. So the future of the capital’s mail delivery remains uncertain.
But a timetable to eliminate door-to-door mail delivery in Summerside had not been announced prior to Monday’s news. Meaning its carriers like Gaudet can rest easy for now.
They’d been expecting a call at any time to say Summerside was next on the list of communities to lose delivery, said Gaudet, and that would have cost the city at least seven carrier jobs, including his own.
“So we knew that the … process for this size of an area was already laid out, so it was really just a matter of them calling the time and flipping the switch,” he said.
According to Canada Post, there were about 460,000 addresses across the country that were in the process of switching to community mailboxes when the suspension was put in place. It includes all the conversions planned for November, December and all of 2016.
As for what the future holds for the corporation, Canadians will have to wait and see. The new Liberal government under Prime Minister Designate Justin Trudeau has promised a full review of the conversion plan and the corporation has said it will co-operate.
“We will work collaboratively with the government of Canada to determine the best path forward given the ongoing challenges faced by the Canadian postal system,” said a statement from the corporation.
Gaudet and his fellow union members added that they don’t intend to rest on their laurels. They plan to join the fight to reverse the changes in the Charlottetown area and the rest of the country.
“Hopefully Trudeau sticks to his word, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to have a tonne of postal workers on his ass all the time,” said Gaudet.