@momcqueen wrote:
Write the Prime Minister’s Office:
https://pm.gc.ca/eng/connect
Aside from being unable to send a letter through the mails just now (more useful than an electronic message), FWIW you can also send a tweet to the PM: https://twitter.com/CanadianPM
But be aware that as an individual citizen writing or tweeting, your missive, along with the thousands of others received each day, will be handled and sorted en masse by topic, by lower-level staff members (or perhaps even bots these days). It will likely never receive a response or ever come to the Prime Minister's attention, except as a data summary. If you do get a reply (but only if you mail your letter -- impossible at the moment!) it will be a form letter produced by a machine, with a machine-facsimile of the PM's signature, if at all.
Nonetheless, sometimes the sheer volume on one subject or one opinion can influence policy and action by the government. This happened during the seal hunt issue many years ago, when the PMO ended up with an entire room of boxes filled with letters which nobody read through. As soon as the word "seal hunt" appeared in a letter, into the boxes it went. All this correspondence was processed via form letters and facsimile signatures over succeeding months.
The far more effective way of being heard and taken into account is to be a member of a larger organization writing or contacting the Prime Minister. I see eBay has already done that, via a public statement, as I would expect other big online venues and retailers will have done.
Another effective way to have your voice heard on a subject is to contact your own MP. A deluge of phone calls, emails or visits to an MP by the citizenry of her or his constituency will most certainly be passed along in some manner, in a more direct way than any individual letter to the Prime Minister would be. If you're really lucky, maybe your MP will happen to be the Minister of Labour.
I have some insight into these matters as I worked in the PMO as a correspondence officer many years ago. Aside from the factor of electronic mail, I doubt the management of incoming correspondence has changed much. Correspondence I was responsible for had already been through triage to remove mass issues and true VIP correspondence. But even the mid-level organizations and groups I was tasked to reply to (which got mostly boilerplate replies with facsimile signatures) never came directly to the PM's attention, except by way of a weekly summary.
So I think we're still better off being represented to the Prime Minister by a big organization with some clout (i.e. eBay) that will have an impact and be noticed. That is, as long as they keep it up. But tweeting or emailing a personal note to the PM will add to the data pile on the subject.
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but not all customers are that patient!!!
