How Did This Happen..?

Hi..Take a look at the Christmas card I received in the mail...Notice there is no cancellations on the stamp..is this some thing new..hoe did it slip past the cancellation process..??

Hi Wert, I'd say 8 out of 10 pieces of mail I receive from Canada have no postmark.

Please remember that most postal authorities now allow for losses due to re-use of uncancelled stamps by increasing their prices… so, actually, if you don't re-use, it's like they're getting something for nothing.
Go ahead and re-use a stamp or two and not feel guilty.

Same here, most letters I receive are not cancelled, they simply have that row of light red bars as the cancellation along with the post date.

I don't know about Canada, but in the US, odd-sized mail such as that one are non-machinable. They get kicked out and have to be hand-processed (so in the US, you are supposed to tack on additional postage as the non-machinable mail surcharge). The postal worker is then supposed to hand-cancel the stamps, but they often either pen-cancel it or don't cancel it at all.

On mail I receive in the US from Canada, it is almost never canceled. The only times I ever got a canceled stamp from Canada was when the sender specifically asked the post office to hand cancel the stamp. I still have a significant pile of uncanceled stamps from Canada, including souvenir sheets. So much for trying to get nice postally used modern Canadian stamps.

For international mail, either incoming or outgoing, there is usually a row of fluorescent bars on the lower back of the envelope, (for machinable mail), along with a two letter month indicator, the date in numerals and a letter signifying the postal district (B= Nova Scotia, E = New Brunswick, V = British Columbia, etc) that is applied at a postal sortation centre.

For non-machinable mail, mail pieces like square envelopes as mentioned, there is usually a place in the sortation center where an employyee or two hand cancel the pieces of mail.

Unfortunately over the last couple years Canada Post employees do get, I believe, a week off at Christmastime it seems. Nice human touch and all but mail is delayed by an extra week or so, and the extra masses of non-machinable mail letters and packages are sent through uncancelled.

All the above is my opinion only, due to observations from outside the postal system over the last couple years. Perhaps wrong in some cases.


A theory for the reason of payment of non-cancelled stamps is the increase in package rates lke Expedited parcels a few years ago paying for the losses incurred by the resale of non-cancelled stamps. Perhaps not.

I get between 3 and 30 pieces of mail per day between office and home. I have had exactly 13 pieces with cancels on stamps in all of December, though many more had flourescent bars.

No cancel is typical in my world.