Canada Post; or, Canada’s random recipient mail bungling service

Last night, while indulging in activities that don’t in the slightest resemble writing my thesis (namely sushi, bridge, and cookie eating), the conversation turned to the quality of service foisted upon Canadians by our omnipresent mail-delivery overlord, Canada Post. Everyone had tales of woe: lost mail; late mail; mail being returned to sender as undeliverable even though the address was correct; a thoroughly inaccurate tracking system that tells you your parcel is still in Mississauga even though it is at your front door. Personally, my experiences with Canada Post have not been that bad. Yes, the tracking system needs to actually update whenever a parcel enters or leaves a sorting facility, and yes, all parcels delivered to the door should require a signature before they are handed over, but not a single bill, bank statement, or important document of mine has ever been misplaced, and almost all of my deliveries have been on time. Realizing I was one of the few Canadians left not completely dismayed with the state of our postal system, the mail deities conspired to align my experiences with the rest of Canada this morning.

A couple of weeks ago I moved, still within Edmonton, just closer to the University. I also set up mail redirection so all mail addressed to me at my old address would be delivered to my new address. While being an invaluable service, Canada Post wisely realized the security risks inherent in allowing people to redirect mail from one address to another, the potential for identity theft with such a service being quite high. In order to set up mail redirection, one has provide the following information: name, old and new addresses, contact information, credit card information, date of birth, SIN, and driver’s licence number. Though the last two of those are optional, you are also required to answer fairly detailed questions about your credit history through an arrangement Canada Post has with Equifax Canada. All of this takes about 20 minutes to complete according to the Canada Post website, though that has to be some kind of upper bound. While not foolproof, there seems to have been a fair amount of effort put into trying to create a secure system, and I’m sure there is a nontrivial amount of logging going on at the back end as well.

This morning two pieces of mail arrive for me, complete with the yellow stickers indicating that they have been redirected to my new address: one from the government, one from a bank. Both seem like fairly important pieces of mail. One small problem: neither of them are actually addressed to me, at my old address or anywhere else. Nor are they addressed to someone whose address is only one digit off – three of the five digits composing the house number are wrong. The postal code is wrong. The intended recipient’s name has a Levenshtein distance of 17 from mine (meaning not only is not a single letter the same, the other name is also four characters longer than mine… and also happens to contain a middle name). There is no way that these two addresses could be confusable.

So Canada Post I ask of you: were those redirection labels meant for letters actually addressed to me but misapplied to the wrong envelope? If yes, where did my letters go? Is half of my mail being redirected to some guy in Mill Woods? If no, and the mail sorter just entered the wrong information into the computer, don’t your workers check to ensure that at least the name matches on the redirection sticker? Why are there not checks in place to verify that something as important as mail is actually being delivered to the correct person at the correct address? All of the effort put in to making it difficult to fraudulently misdirect mail is worth very little if you are going to misdirect the mail all on your own.