Years ago, when I worked for Canada Post in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, I was instructed that the regulations of the Universal Postal Union required that mail to another country had to be sent to that country by the most direct route possible. Thus, if we received mail addressed to Boston we were not to send it to Montreal, the nearest Canadian centre to Boston, but to Minneapolis. The U.S. Postal Service would take over from there.

I have always wondered if the employees of the U.S. Postal Service have the same rules, or if they even know which direction to send mail addressed to some place in Canada. That question arises from a long history of receiving mail sent from places in Europe, Africa or Asia within a week, while mail from the USA takes anywhere from one to three weeks.

Thirty years ago, while we were living in Ontario, my wife had cancer surgery just before Christmas. Friends of ours were on their way to spend Christmas with family members who were missionaries in Belize. They bought a get well card in Texas and put it in the mail. They went on to Belize, spent almost two weeks there and then drove home. Their card arrived two days later – a full three weeks after the date on the Texas postmark.

Twenty years ago we were living in Montréal. I bought an Epson ink jet printer; the price was pretty hefty back then, but they were offering a nice rebate. This required sending a form and proof of purchase to an organization in Minnesota. I received a letter back explaining that the rebate was only available to people living in North America. I wrote back and asked them to look on a map, Montréal is a major North American city. I sent a copy of the letter to Epson. I got my rebate.

An acquaintance of ours told of how her family had moved from Montréal to Florida when she was still in elementary school. Her first day in school the teacher asked her to come up and tell the class about her trip across the ocean to the USA.

“But, we didn’t come across the ocean.”

“How did you get here then?”

“We drove.”

“How is that possible? Where is Canada?”

Whereupon the girl pointed out where Canada was on the classroom map.

“Oh. Is that Canada? I always thought that area up there was part of the USA.”

I suspect that at least some employees of the U.S. Postal Service had that same teacher, or one very much like her. I ordered three used books from Amazon last month. The first got here in a week, from England. The second, from the USA, took three weeks. The last one, also from the USA, came yesterday, a full four weeks after I had ordered it online.

There was a Royal Mail sticker over the top right corner of the address label and customs declaration. That mystified me. Why would a package from the USA have a postal sticker from the UK?

There seemed to be another sticker under it, so my wife tore off the Royal Mail sticker and there we read “La Poste, Paris, France,”still covering the corner of the original label.

I rest my case.