A new year, a same old bug-a-bear.

Over the holidays I had time to look at the Canada Post web site, as well as some of the courier companies that serve Labrador. I did this because the ever increasing cost of receiving and sending parcels to and from northern remote communities has long been a pain in everybody’s butts and pockets.
People have complained about the costs for years, politicians cant seem to, or are not motivated enough, to put effort into finding out exactly why the high costs, not to mention the what looks like huge discrepancies in costs of shipping in some of the legs in getting packages to northern towns.

I know some politicians put some effort into this issue a number of years back, there was a Northern Advisory Board formed to supposedly advise Canada Post Northern Service. For reasons never explained it was disbanded without fan fair.

I have put together some cost comparisons from the appropriate web sites, all figures are inclusive of taxes and fuel surcharges. All sites advise that the figures quoted are approximate, the final $ figure would be revealed at point of shipping.
I checked out the Canada Post Small Business rate too, for some reason they are higher than the consumer rate, so I have not included them here.

So here are the rates for a package weighing 4 Kg with dimensions of 87cm L x 34cm H x 42cm W. That is the size and approximate weight of the storage unit I was going to buy, but did not due to high shipping costs compared to the purchase price [$24.99]. For those not familiar; once a package exceeds a certain size, or exceeds a certain size and weight, Canada Post “cubes it” with some complicated formula. This means they measure the packages length, width, height, factor in the weight, where it is destined, where it is from. Not having a degree in Postoligy [rimes with Proctology] I’m at a complete loss with it.



The big anomaly from our [remote towns] point of view is the cost that Air Labrador charges to ship the package from HV-GB to Nain, and what that same section costs with Canada Post and the courier company’s.
There are other questions in some of the charges for different sections, but I will go into them in a later post.

Puralator takes 18 days to ship parcel from St.John's to Nain, wow.

The format has/will change when I post this to Blogger, hopefully it will still make sense, to some extent.


Canada Post:

Priority. Regular. XPressPost.

Toronto 300.33 139.71 280.27
Nain
3 9 3 Days.
Toronto 160.91 32.55 87.89
HV-GB

Vancouver 300.33 137.06 238.56
Nain
3 12 3 Days.
Vancouver 157.82 35.65 113.13
HV-GB

StJohn's 240.07 117.65 163.4
Nain
5 11 5 Days.
StJohn's 44.21 23.31 25.62
HV-GB
2 10 2 Days.

HV-GB 192.23 41.95 141.53
Nain


Air Labrador: HV-GB to Nain: 1.21 a lb + taxes = 1.46 with 15.00 minimum + taxes minimum = 17.86

Purolator courier service.


AIR. Ground.
Toronto to Nain 103.17 85.02

Toronto to HV-GB 76.14 52.51

HV-GB to Nain 102.18 Includes
59.90 Beyond surcharge.

Vancouver to Nain 115.47 88.51

Vancouver to HV-GB 75.92 48.96

HV-GB to Nain See above.


St John's to Nain 113.54 84.83
45.90 Beyond surcharge.
StJohn's to Hv-GB HV-GB 74.01 45.28

HV-GB to Nain See above.



I did a check of FedEx site, all their prices are higher, or the price would depend on when you ship it.