Colby Cosh on a recent incident in Regina where a Canada Post employee took it upon himself to act as a local censor for people on his delivery route:
Today’s idiot of the day is not, perhaps surprisingly, the Regina postman who got suspended for refusing to deliver the Epoch Times, the oddball anti-communist newspaper that’s affiliated with China’s persecuted Falun Gong religious movement. Don’t get us wrong: Ramiro Sepulveda is clearly a bit of a nitwit. He seems to believe that a newspaper founded by commie-hating Chinese-Americans is designed to provoke hatred toward “Asian communities in North America.”
Sepulveda didn’t want to deliver free copies of the Times to non-soliciting customers because it “spits lies.” Perhaps regrettably, the strong reaction by Canada Post means that our junk mail, quite a lot of which consists of boastful missives from politicians, is not destined to be fact-checked and aggressively suppressed by the corporation’s rank and file.
Sepulveda was properly punished for not doing his job. And Canada Post used the opportunity to promote its content-neutrality as an agent of the state, although it did not quite dare to use the phrase “statutory monopoly.” In a statement to the broadcasters who reported on Sepulveda’s off-piste personal fact-checking, the agency said: “Canada Post is obligated to deliver any mail that is properly prepared and paid for, unless it is considered non-mailable matter. The courts have told Canada Post that its role is not to act as the censor of mail or to determine the extent of freedom of expression in Canada.”
They might have added that access to the mail has been denied to individuals for spreading hatred only a handful of times in the history of the country; this, too, is as it ought to be, and it is certainly not postal employees who ought to be improvising such bans. Ideally, all postmen would be doing their best not to create the suspicion that they are eyeballing what is sent to our homes with the intention of ringing up a reporter and causing a fuss. Say what you like about these poor toilers: most of them never give us any reason to doubt their discretion.
