MONTREAL - The postal strike is over but at least one business is still living the crisis.
Richard Repper runs a medium-sized business magazine publication company called Presses Commerciale in St-Laurent and reported Friday that posties were still refusing to picking up his mail, which makes it hard to reach invoice his 22,000 Canadian customers.
That's a problem because he has 1,500 bills to send out and there's no money coming in if those bills don't get paid.
"I can't invoice my customers," said Repper. "From a financial standpoint it's a disaster."
Commercial outlets such as his are not permitted to simply toss their large volumes of mail in the red boxes, so the pickup has become a daily negotiation, which hasn't been a positive one.
"Our mailman is a very nice guy, he arrives at 2:30 and he looks at the mail and says ‘I can't bring that back.' He is instructed not to pick up the mail," said Repper. "If we're lucky he'll pick up like 20 envelopes, he says ‘I'm not supposed to but I'll do it.'"
Retter says that the backlog problem has threatened his business. The postal union says that the problem could take a couple of months to resolve but the brass says it will be solved much sooner.
"The letter carriers have the order to prioritize the junk mail before the real mail," explained Alain Duguay, postal union president.
The postal management said promised that it would get delivered, eventually.
"It's going to take us until the end of next week before we resolve this backlog," said Anick Losier, Canada Post spokesperson.
After CTV Montreal reported on the situation Friday afternoon, a postal worker collected the entire backlog later that day. The post office said that the decision to pick up the mail had been made prior to the airing of the news report.
