USPO, Canada Catch Border Disease

One of the things that makes life a whole lot easier on the Point is that the U.S. Post Office provides terrific service. In a place where it’s pretty much impossible to buy most things locally, where it’s difficult to get to the ROTUS to buy things, and where going to Canada to buy things involves purchasing in a foreign currency or getting dinged an extra roughly 5% for credit card purchases (punishment for using a U.S. credit card in a foreign country) plus an extra 4% in sales tax (Canadian sales tax is now about 12%, whereas Washington sales tax is only 8.4%), not to mention declaring everything purchased in Canada at the border and having some things that cannot be brought across the border in any circumstances. All this makes the fact that you can easily buy things in ROTUS and have them sent to you via the post office or UPS very important.

I have never lived in a place where the USPO’s employees were more efficient, welcoming, helpful. I celebrate them every day. Recently, however, the USPO, in the larger sense, decided that anything in a rural/street mailbox must be removed within three days or the post office personnel will remove it and take it god knows where, as Nichols and May used to described bureaucratic actions. I understand this is not a rule devised for Point Roberts, but for people throughout the country who can’t be bothered to take their mail out of their mailbox on some regular basis. Point Roberts isn’t the only largely resort community in the U.S., so it’s not going to be the only community that is adversely affected by this new ruling. However, the effect of the ruling here is particularly pernicious.

Many of the Canadians who own property on the Point are here only seasonally. Thus, they are not here to remove mail from their mail boxes every three days. My sense of it is that most of them come by now and then in the off-season to check their houses, pick up their mail, buy some gas. They may have to get their monthly bills in order to pay them, of course, but there’s no point in coming more than once a month for that activity. Now, they will have to cross the border more frequently if they want to get their mail. It’s no use proposing that they get mailboxes at the post office, because they are rarely available for rent. So now, the post office is going to be behind an enhanced cluttering of the border crossing.

To add to the postal problem, the Canadian border people have announced that the USPO truck that delivers the mail up here can no longer pass through in the car lane. Instead, it must go through the commercial lanes at the main US-Canada border, a decision that will add several hours to the trip each day, each way. In addition to that, the commercial lane requires that trucks passing through the border carry paper manifests that provide detailed documentation of what they are transporting into Canada. A manifest that says ‘MAIL’ is unlikely to be what border people will consider ‘detailed.’ So maybe there won’t be any more mail, or maybe somebody official will have to think through both these policies again (or maybe for the first time, to be somewhat less generous).

Every week, every month, there seems to be yet another squeeze on us. You could ask whether it is just general incompetence that is dramatically increasing or, as a friend proposed, the government is thinking of getting us all to leave Point Roberts so that it can reclaim it as a military reserve, which it was up until about a hundred years ago. If I start going there, though, my first thought is that it could be the site for Gitmo II. Not so warm as the current Gitmo, of course. Not at all tropical. But at least it doesn't involve dealing with anyone named Castro.