Home Mail Delivery on Rural Roads to Continue: Canada Post 

Rural residents with roadside mailboxes will continue to receive at-home mail delivery for the time being, Canada Post has confirmed.

The federal mail service is set to phase out household delivery, affecting about 4 million addresses over the next five years as part of a restructuring aimed at cutting costs after record losses at the Crown corporation.

Some 700,000 homes have rural mailboxes, or roughly 4 percent of the 17.8 million addresses served by the agency. Some rural residents say the change would force them to travel several kilometres to collect their mail.

The Crown corporation released a statement confirming rural addresses will not be impacted by the plan to cut back on home delivery, at least for the moment.

“For now, people who already receive their mail via rural mailboxes will see no change,” the agency said. “These addresses are not part of the initial announcement targeting the 4 million addresses that still receive home delivery and will eventually be converted to community mailboxes.”

Seventy-three percent of addresses in Canada are already served by community mailboxes, post office boxes, or mailboxes grouped in multi-unit residential buildings, according to Canada Post.

The agency recently announced plans to add to that number, beginning with 136,000 addresses across 13 communities. Most addresses targeted in the first phase of the switch to community mailboxes are in British Columbia and Ontario, but Manitoba, Quebec, and New Brunswick will also be impacted, according to an April 16 press release from Canada Post.

The regions selected for the initial phase of the transition are near neighbourhoods that already have community mailboxes, Canada Post said. The changeover to this style of mailbox is expected to take several months and involve consultations with the communities regarding the placement of the mailboxes.

The Crown corporation first announced the planned change in a March 31 statement, several months after Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound said widespread changes were necessary to curb financial losses due to the ongoing decline in mail volumes.

Lightbound announced last September that Ottawa plans to adopt all the recommendations made by Industrial Inquiry Commissioner William Kaplan in a report to the government in May of the same year. The report included multiple points aimed at improving the agency’s financial situation.

Canada Post reported a record loss of $1.57 billion in 2025, a figure it has attributed to labour uncertainty and challenges in modernization that hindered its ability to be competitive. The mail carrier said the loss was its largest ever since it was incorporated as a Crown agency in the fall of 1981.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.