Ottawa gardener wants to return community mailboxes to sender

When Marymay Downing moved into her Ottawa townhouse two decades ago, there wasn’t much but a patch of weeds when it came to neighbourhood landscaping.

Over the years, the 64-year-old guerilla gardener has cultivated six community gardens in the neighbourhood, with eclectic mixes of flowers, vegetables and herbs.

“When you’re out there working people stop and talk to you and tell you how much they like the garden and thank you for doing it,” she tells Yahoo Canada News.

But Downing is devastated that Canada Post plans to erect a suite of community mailboxes, including one just outside her back yard. The mailbox will not displace the community garden she’s built there but it will block the view of it from the street.

“As one of my neighbours says, it will be ugly,” she says.

It will also bring dozens of people to the edge of her back yard on a daily basis, she says.

“My privacy will be destroyed and this is the only thing I do now,” says Downing, a former University of Ottawa professor now living on a disability pension due to Meniere’s disease, an inner ear disorder that causes progressive deafness and potentially tinnitus and vertigo.

“My limited world now is going to be invaded by 48 households of people coming daily looking into my backyard.”

Downing has planted a protest garden on the spot where Canada Post planned to erect the mailbox this month.

She’s not the only person opposed to the plan.

The Crown corporation has not been terribly popular since announcing the end of door-to-door service to 900,000 addresses in 90 communities across the country, replacing it with community mailboxes.

In April, a homeowner in Dorval, Que., put up a steel fence and dumped a huge load of soil on the city easement in front of his home to prevent the installation of a community mailbox.

Sixty-year-old Henry Evans-Tenbrinke held a one-man sit-in for weeks at a site in Hamilton, Ont., to prevent installation. On Friday, another man was arrested over a dispute with contractors at that site.

In Edmonton, Deanna Kaminski built a planter last month to stop the mailbox from being put up in front of her home but to no avail. The postal agency says the community mailbox will go ahead a few feet from the original location.

The city of Hamilton went to court to try and stop the agency from erecting super mailboxes on municipal land, but lost the fight.

Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton says the agency has knocked on 50,000 doors and held extensive consultations about the mailboxes.

“Ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a good discussion and we’re able to get to a point where we’re ready to install,” he tells Yahoo Canada News. “We have had some people who have been against the boxes for various reasons.”

The Crown corporation has changed about 25 per cent of the initial locations over concerns from the public about viable safety issues or because there were more convenient locales, he says.

“However, we can’t just make every change that comes our way.”

The elimitation of door-to-door service will save $500-600 million a year, Hamilton says.

There has been a decline in mail deliveries from five billion annually in 2006 to 3.6 billion last year. That decline will continue, he says.

“The goal is to secure the future postal service in the country,” Hamilton says.

But Downing is not convinced.

“It’s a stupid policy,” she says. “I’m going to do everything I possibly can to prevent it from happening.”