The Canada Adventures of Arielle Gabriel

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The Canada Adventures of Arielle Gabriel

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Canada Post: Tons of Real Letters

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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.

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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 rats 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!

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