USA Rejects Canadian "Registered Mail"

This week, I tried to send a #10 envelope with one sheet of paper to a USA address as registered mail. Last year the cost was $15.

According to two Canada Post postmasters, effective January 1st. 2014, the USA postal system stopped allowing registered mail from Canada.

I had to send it Canada Post "Xpresspost" at $25.

UPS wanted $48.

Does anyone know why this is the USA's position?

Note: All $amounts are rounded.

Corrected: title to "Xpresspost"

USPS apparently denies any problem, so the issue is with Canada Post, at least as far as this Linn's Stamp News article reports it:

http://www.linns.com/news/postal-ne...nited-States

http://postandparcel.info/59660/new...#comment-315

My thanks to wt1 for providing the correct information on this issue.

Fascinating articles - in particular, the one in which the USPS denied any wrongdoing. I can speak from experience - the USPS does not always (perhaps not at all?) track international registered letters or parcels after they make it through customs. Over the past 2 years, I have had 3 items lost by the USPS which I tried tracking. They all made it to the US (as confirmed by the tracking numbers) but none were track-able once received by the USPS. Two were eventually delivered to me, and one has been lost for nearly two years. Good for Canada Post for calling the USPS on its poor performance!

Brian

One point that hasn't been clarified is with regard to the "temporary" suspension of Registered Mail from Canada to the US. In that it is now nine months later, is it still a "temporary" suspension or will it be re-established at some point...who knows when?

Hello all
The latest issue of THE CANADIAN PHILATELIST (Royal Philatelic Society of Canada) features a short piece on page 268 explaining the circumstances surrounding the problem. Robert Odenweller, when the editor of The Collectors Club Philatelist, wrote a column in 2009 explaining that the US Post Office responding to pressure from Congress to cut costs changed the way it handled inbound registered mail.

It is reported that registered mail coming into the U.S.A. was logged in at the exchange office but then dumped into the ordinary first class mailstream without secure handling and without obtaining evidence of delivery.

In January 2014, Canada Post suspended acceptance of registered mail to the U.S.A.

There is more information contained in the article, but this is the essence of the situation. There is no denying that the responsibility for the problem lies south of the border.

GJP

And none of this was widely reported to the public, of course. Knowing what I do now, I'm starting to get irritated about not receiving my package from Germany.

Actually, this isn't a new problem. When I worked for a well-known auctioneer in the late 1970s, I remember receiving a registered envelope from Europe marked handle as certified mail in the US postal system. The envelope contained about $200K worth of rare stamps. A complaint to the USPS resulted in a reply indicating that maybe this one shouldn't have been handled in that fashion.

One of the clerks at my local P.O. told me about the change in handling of international Registered Mail a year or two ago. International "Registered Mail" is no longer handled in the same manner as domestic "Registered Mail." The domestic is secured under lock and key and logged at each step along the way. International, on the other hand, is thrown in with the regular mail stream.

I think that part of the problem is that the term "Registered Mail" means different things in different countries. Registered Mail in some countries only costs the equivalent of a buck or two additional, and is NOT under lock and key until it hits the U.S. border, at which point it creates a huge unfunded mandate for the USPS.

I've always wondered how international sellers can afford to send $10 purchases via Registered Mail. The answer is that it is much cheaper for them because their country doesn't handle Registered Mail with the same level of security we do in this country.

Registered mail from Canada was suspended due to the theft of registered items at Kennedy International Airport in New York. The morons who were stealing the mail must have forgotten that it is tracked. I have an item that was stolen and has either not been recovered or is part of the evidence. The mostly Fijian colonial stamps were from a gentleman in Alberta. I have copies of the tracking for my files if the items are ever returned.

Registered from Canada was only recorded at the point of departure from Canada (and the sending point of course) and the delivery day point of reception by the customer.

No actual tracking in between was ever involved.

So basically you had an item you knew had been ent and been delivered. Nothing else.


To get anything else you had to more expensive tracked means of sending like Xpresspost (similar to Priority I think). That shows you every step of the way electronically. Collectble labels also!