Canada Post hit with nearly $1 million in parking fees a year: data

Elianna Lev
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA - 2015/08/13: Red and white color Canada Post delivery truck passing through a traffic junction. Canada Post or Postes Canada, is the crown corporation which functions as the country's primary postal operator. It was earlier known as Royal Mail Canada. (Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
A Canada Post delivery truck passes through an intersection in Toronto. (Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Sealed with a kiss? More like sealed with a parking ticket. Newly released data shows that Canada Post drivers aren’t except from the perils of crowded roads.

An investigation by the Canadian Press shows the crown corporation racks up nearly $1 million in parking tickets yearly, as delivery drivers attempt to traverse crowded streets in a timely manner.

The data, which was obtained through freedom of information requests, shows that most of the tickets were issued in the Toronto region.

In the last decade, Canada Post has paid almost $7.5 million in parking tickets. In 2016, it was hit with the most citations, paying a total of $943,293, almost quadruple the $289,908 worth of tickets recorded in 2009.

A spokesman for Canada Post said employees regularly have to park their vehicles and the “concentration of addresses in urban downtown cores and a rising demand for pickups and deliveries” can lead to challenges, which is a predicament faced by all driving companies.

While Canada Post vehicles were ticketed throughout the country, most were issued in major urban areas. However, a spokesman for the Toronto traffic police said that Canada Post doesn’t doesn’t get preferential treatment, even though it’s a crown corporation. Canada Post drivers are expected to follow provincial and municipal bylaws.

“In some areas, it is difficult to find a legal parking space, so our members do have to park illegally and some do incur parking tickets,” said Emilie Tobin, with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. “It’s not an ideal system and postal workers would prefer that routes could be structured in a way that allowed for legal parking 100 per cent of the time.”

Last year, Canada Post’s fleet of nearly 13,000 vehicles delivered about eight billion pieces of mail. It also lost $270 million on revenue of $6.6 billion dollars, which is three-quarters of the company’s total revenues.