NOVEMBER 23, 2024

Dear reader,

Striking Canada Post workers have now been off the job for more than a week. About 55,000 employees are demanding better wages, benefits and working conditions. As they picket, Canadians are navigating the chaos of being cut off from mail. Online shoppers are worrying about missing out on Black Friday deals; small businesses are scrambling to find new shipping options; Service Canada is holding some 85,000 passports; and many income assistance cheques are in limbo.

The last time postal workers walked off the job was in October of 2018. The corporation was facing a steady decline of snail mail and growing competition from same-day delivery services like Amazon. Then came the pandemic and all the workplace health and safety hazards that accompanied it. In those early days of Covid, fear of the virus was palpable, particularly among front line workers in close quarters. This week, we’re revisiting one Canada Post employee’s tell-all from that time,which reveals what it was like inside Toronto’s largest mail facility.

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—Chris Bilton, features editor

I work at Toronto’s largest postal facility. When my colleague got Covid, I was scared. When 280 others caught it, I was convinced I was next. A memoir from inside the Gateway plant

BY PRATIBHA GUPTA | APRIL 13, 2021

Gateway is the largest Canada Post facility in the country—450,000 pieces of mail are processed every eight hours. The plant is packed with thousands of busy employees, making it next to impossible to avoid close contact. During the pandemic, workers were terrified. As Pratibha Gupta wrote in 2021, “We were never sure if the mail we were dealing with on any given day had been licked or handled by someone with Covid-19. As cases started rising in Canada, every piece of mail felt deadly. The fear increased in lockstep with the number of cases.” 

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