Royal Mail Suspends Shipments to Canada – USPS and Others Next?
Royal Mail has issued a bulletin they have now suspended shipments to Canada until the labor dispute at Canada Post is resolved.
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Here is the full text of the Royal Mail bulletin:
“As a result of ongoing industrial action, we have now been requested to suspend the dispatching of international traffic destined for Canada, from today until further notice.
Items posted yesterday (November 14) and entering the network today will be held safely in our international distribution centre, awaiting further updates from Canada Post.
This applies not only to us, but all International Postal Operators.
Canada Post are aware of the impact to all customers and are therefore continuing to attempt to reach a settlement with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).
We recommend you consider delaying sending items bound for Canada in the coming days as we expect this to remain the situation until we receive further guidance.
However, if you still wish to send items bound for Canada, we are still accepting them and will continue to hold them at our international distribution centre.
Once we know the outcome of the latest negotiations, we will then either suspend our services to Canada, not accepting your items, or we will start to ease our backlog by forwarding items to Canada for distribution.
The volume of backlogs currently being seen in Canada mean that it will take some time to clear these items, as overtime hours are being limited by CUPW representatives.”
USPS and Others Next?
The statement from Royal Mail indicates that this service stoppage request from Canada Post also applies to other international mail operators.
A quick search on the service alerts page by USPS does not show the U.S. postal service has issued a similar alert.
Sofar USPS only warns of delays for shipments going to or coming from Canada, but that could change if Royal Mail’s statement is to be believed.
No Deal
And with news coming out this afternoon that the latest offer by Canada Post to its workers is being rejected by the union without even asking workers to vote on it, the situation in Canada is not getting any better.
With this news, it now appears the only safe way to ship orders to Canada is to use alternative shipping carriers.
READ MORE: eBay Sends Letter to Canadian PM Trudeau on Behalf of Small Businesses
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Richard Meldner
Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.
To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.