The fight over the fate of a shuttered Canada Post office in Chinatown isn’t over just yet

On Wednesday, Vancouver city council voted unanimously in favour of a motion from Councillor Pete Fry to express formal support for the continued operation of a post office in Chinatown following its Nov. 12 closure by Canada Post.

The motion also calls on Mayor Ken Sim to write letters to key players in Canada Post and the federal government, and to explore the option of using city-owned space to reopen another location in the area.

“I live in the neighbourhood, so I've been aware that there's been a pretty active campaign led by young Chinatown activists who highlighted this imminent closure, and then when it did close, what the impacts were,” Fry told Vancity Lookout. 

After the post office closed, which was the one Fry used, he noticed that he missed a package delivery. It was then redirected to an outlet on Commercial Drive, about 3.5 kilometres away. That wasn’t much of an issue for him as “an able-bodied guy,” but he realized that for an elderly Chinatown resident, that would represent a major barrier. 

“I recognized that that particular postal outlet served a very vulnerable population. A lot of older people who didn't speak English,” he said. “Lots of people who need to get mail to receive benefit checks and stuff like that. They don't do electronic banking. They have limited access to technology. A lot of folks living in SRO-type housing don't really have the benefit of, necessarily, a safe place to leave mail or packages. And so there's a variety of very specific needs.”

In an emailed statement, Canada Post’s public relations manager Phil Legault said that “both the business owners and Canada Post mutually agreed to close this location.”

The owners, who took over operation of the Main Street business in 2022, declined to comment, but a person with inside knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named told Vancity Lookout that the current owners are still on the hook for all liabilities and costs, such as rent on the closed business, which adds up to approximately $10,000 per month.

The closure comes as Canada Post faces record financial losses and cuts to service. In September, government transformation minister Joël Lightbound authorized changes to letter delivery standards, an end to door-to-door delivery service and a conversion to community mailboxes, and the lifting of a moratorium on the closure of rural post offices.

On Wednesday, local letter carrier and Canada Union of Postal Workers coordinator Jamie McCurrach told city council that Canada Post was also trying to remove protections against closure for three other Vancouver post offices during the union’s current round of negotiations. 

These include an outlet in the Bentall Centre, one at 495 West Georgia and one in a heritage building at 2405 Pine Street.

McCurrach also expressed concern that the move to community mailboxes would shift the burden of paying for snow removal and vandalism onto the city, and that many of those mailbox locations are chosen without regard for appropriate street lighting or wheelchair accessible curbs.

Alex Bernstein, a letter carrier on Vancouver’s North Shore and a CUPW organizing director, told Wednesday’s meeting that he believes the shuttering of retail postal outlets like the one in Chinatown is a strategic move by Canada Post to systemically gut the company before selling it off to privatize interests.

“Right now, this public service that everybody uses is just being eroded in front of our eyes, and we see no greater example of it than the closing of the Chinatown post office,” Bernstein told Vancity Lookout. 

“I think it's demonstrative that it is this neighbourhood, it's a neighbourhood full of people of colour. It's a neighbourhood full of the economically downtrodden. It's all the more egregious that that's happening there, but it's not just this post office. This is just a high-profile, highly visible one that happens to have great advocates on its behalf that are fighting for it. The reality is that it's now happening across the country, and it's happening across the country with the stamp of the federal government that says, ‘we don't need this. Canadians don't need this.’” 

A petition to support the post office circulated by the Save Chinatown YVR group gathered more than 1,200 signatures so far. It’s part of a broader campaign to draw attention to what the group describes as ongoing gentrification in the area.

“We're seeing a degradation of public services, public space, essential services for Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, while government policies and real estate development pressures are increasingly gentrifying the neighbourhood,” said resident and Save Chinatown YVR lead Melody Ma. “What we're seeing is almost like a redlining of services in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.”

In mid-November a controversial condo project next to Chinatown Memorial Square was approved by the city’s development permit board. Critics like Ma are worried it will drive up property and rent prices, displace seniors and low-income residents from the area and overshadow the public space built to memorialize Chinese veterans and railway workers.

Last week, hundreds of residents registered to speak at public hearings hosted by the city on a proposed massive rezoning of the Downtown Eastside’s Oppenheimer District, and the next meeting is scheduled for Dec. 16. 

Ma says there are also city-recommended redevelopment plans in the works that will impact Chinatown and Chinese-owned businesses in the area like the Ovaltine Cafe, which houses an SRO on the floors above the business.

“The City of Vancouver on one hand is like, ‘we want to uplift Chinatown, we want to prioritize the heritage.’ And they had this apology to Chinese folks several years ago. And then on the other hand, it's like the people, the buildings, the community — its cultural and social life — is disposable,” said Ma.