Cross-Border Cooperation

On Wednesday, I was at the Canadian post office in Tsawwassen to mail some Canada-destination mail and, to my surprise, was greeted at the front door by a 4-foot-high cardboard cutout of the charming nutcracker that adorned my U.S. Christmas stamps. The Point Roberts post office had the stamps, but not the 4-foot cutout. Bring them together, was my thought. But I also wondered, in passing, why the U.S. Christmas stamp cutout was adorning the Canadian post office.

Then, yesterday, I was at the Point Roberts (American) post office where I saw on the wall a framed pair of blown-up stamps with the same image: some kind of tall-sailed ship sailing in a blustering wind. Nice stamps, I thought, but why frame two? Looking past the image, I realized that one said 80 cents and one said $1.00; moreover, the dollar one said CANADA and the 80 cent one said U.S.

Aha! I surmised. These are same-image stamps sold on the respective sides of the border and one is the Canadian first-class postage to the U.S., while the other is the U.S. first-class postage to Canada. At the moment, the exchange rate makes these pretty much equal-in-monetary-value stamps. But how interesting that there is that kind of cooperation between the two national post offices, between the two countries.

And how noteworthy that that is where my mind went: amazing, the U.S. is capable of working cooperatively with another country on postage stamps. I daresay the U.S. works cooperatively with lots of countries on lots of small issues (and even some big ones), but that fact has become largely discounted in my life. So I was happy to see cooperative work once again and with no big and blustery notice about it.