Canada to end home mail delivery Cost-saving measure: Home mail deilvery will be replaced with community mailboxes. Ottawa: Canada's postal service will scrap door-to-door mail delivery over the next five years and cut as many as 8000 jobs to offset declining mail volume. Canada Post will stop delivering mail directly to individual households and Canadians will instead have to collect their mail from community mailboxes that are to be set up in neighbourhoods nationwide, Canada Post said. The new boxes will be installed over five years, starting in the second half of 2014. Two-thirds of Canadian households - those in newer suburbs, towns or rural parts - already receive mail delivery through community mailboxes or roadside kiosks. The announcement affects the remaining third of households, mostly those in older city neighbourhoods. Canada Post also announced a near doubling of the price of sending letters to $CAN1 ($1.05) a stamp, effective March 31. The measures are part of a plan to save between $C700 million ($725 million) and $C900 million a year, Canada Post in a statement on Wednesday. Canada Post delivers close to 10 billion letters and parcels each year to more than 15.3 million addresses across the country. In its last annual report, it noted a 23.6 per cent drop in lettermail from 2008 as Canadians increasingly turned to email and paying household bills online. This resulted in Canada Post losing $C73 million in the last quarter. "With the increasing use of digital communication and the historic decline of lettermail volumes, Canada Post has begun to post significant financial losses," the postal service said in the statement. If left unchecked, continued losses would soon jeopardise its financial self-sufficiency and become a significant burden on taxpayers. An April report by the Conference Board of Canada estimated the agency will lose nearly $C1 billion annually by 2020 unless it makes changes. Canada Post will cut between 6000 and 8000 jobs, or almost 12 per cent of its staff, mainly through attrition. The agency will return to "financial sustainability" by 2019, it said. Canada Post employed about 68,000 people at the end of last year. The Canadian agency's plan is "short-sighted and foolish," the union representing postal workers said in a statement. "We are extremely concerned that these changes will send Canada Post into a downward spiral," said Denis Lemelin, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, in the statement. The skyrocketing stamp prices will make the postal service inaccessible to many people. Olivia Chow, a lawmaker with the main opposition New Democratic Party, also criticised the plan. "These job-killing and service-cutting measures will isolate seniors, the poor and the disabled living in urban areas," Ms Chow said. Bloomberg, Agence-France Presse