Puslinch (and sometimes Cambridge, Guelph or Hamilton) — the Ontario town with four different addresses

PUSLINCH (AND SOMETIMES CAMBRIDGE, GUELPH OR HAMILTON) - When Speedway Trailers moved its operation to Wellington County Road 34, Bronwyn Simpson had some testing to do.

The location technically has a Cambridge mailing address, but the property falls within the boundaries of Puslinch Township.

Simpson, the assistant to owner Tony Salamone, experimented with giving either a Puslinch, Cambridge or Guelph address to see whether the mail would arrive.

Sometimes it would, she said, sometimes it wouldn't - it's really hit or miss."

Historically, Canada Post assigns mailing addresses by the location where the mail is processed and not the actual city or town the building falls in. This means that thousands of private residences and businesses across the country have addresses that don't actually correlate with where they are found on a map.

In the case of Speedway Trailers, its address is based off the Cambridge mailing station in Hespeler. Other residents living in Puslinch who are served by mailing stations in neighbouring Guelph or Hamilton face similar problems.

In just one town, residents can have one of four different addresses - Puslinch, Cambridge, Guelph or Hamilton.

The primary concern with this situation is that people need to be able to be identified by their physical location, not a mailing address," said Puslinch chief administrative officer Glenn Schwendinger.

This can have impacts on a number of things such as dispatching for emergency response, which I understand was one of the factors associated with working on getting this resolved."

And the town is not alone.

Canada Post has started the long process of updating addresses across the country to better represent their physical location.

As part of our civic addressing program we are looking at the possibility of a civic addressing initiative for the residents of Puslinch Township in the near future," said Nicole Lecompte, spokesperson for Canada Post.

The civic addressing program - which has already been implemented in various regions across the country - is the matching of a physical address to its mailing address.

This matching gives customers one consistent address to serve both purposes and helps Canada Post improve efficiency and accuracy of mail and parcel delivery," she said. Civic addressing also helps 911 responders locate emergencies."

But outside of emergency response issues, there's a number of practical day-to-day problems that these residents have to contend with.

The biggest issue, said Kendra Kallonen, is dealing with service operators that decide whether you fall within their jurisdiction based on a postal code.

Kallonen lives on Sideroad 10 North in Puslinch but has a Cambridge address.

Trying to order something online can sometimes just be a nightmare," she said.

Even getting online in the first place isn't easy.

Internet providers, she said, will often say they can service her home because it falls within Hespeler before realizing that she lives in a rural area in Puslinch. She ran into a similar problem trying to get side panels for her house.

I'll put in my postal code, and they'll be like oh sure, we can do it.' And then they physically show up to the property and they realize this isn't where they thought it was."

In a global pandemic, the address issue has also created challenges with vaccines when some of the Puslinch residents went to get vaccinated locally and their address reflected another municipality.

As soon as we became aware of this challenge with the vaccinations, we immediately provided the necessary data to our local health unit to ensure our residents could get vaccinated," said Schwendinger. Thankfully, they were able to update their databases quickly in response, and things then moved forward quickly."

Now, he said, the town is working with Canada Post to move the process along to update the remaining addresses.

Work on this issue was paused for a bit," said Schwendinger. But I understand that we have again had discussions with Canada Post recently and indications are that work will commence again in an effort to deal with the remaining areas."

Robert Williams is a Waterloo Region-based reporter for The Record. Reach him via email: robertwilliams@torstar.ca