Toronto Star Referrer

New facility honours Toronto’s first Black letter carrier

ISABEL TEOTONIO

Canada Post has unveiled a new flagship facility in Scarborough that will be its “largest and greenest” parcel-sorting plant and will be named after Toronto’s first Black letter carrier.

The Albert Jackson Processing Centre — a $470-million state-ofthe-art zero-carbon plant slated to open in 2023 — will help deal with the dramatic spike in online shopping throughout the pandemic, which is expected to grow.

The plant will employ about 1,000 people and be a critical hub in the company’s national network, with the capacity to process more than one million packages a day.

At a naming ceremony last week, Canada Post president and CEO Doug Ettinger described the centre as its “largest and greenest parcelsorting facility” that will “improve service, reduce our environmental footprint and enhance the overall work experience for our employees.”

“The last two years have shown us that we must expand parcel capacity across our network to keep pace with surging demand. This is especially true for the Greater Toronto Area,” he said, adding about 40 per cent of all parcels originate in the GTA.

He said the Gateway facility in Mississauga, which is currently its largest plant, “has been stretched

beyond capacity for several years.” The new facility — at 1395 Tapscott Rd., near Steeles Avenue East and Markham Road — will process twice as many packages as Gateway does.

Ettinger said inclusion has become a “big part of who we are and who we strive to be,” noting “like a lot of companies, it took us time to get to this place … We didn’t always live up to these ideals, but we’ve learned that it’s important to acknowledge our past, so we can do better.”

That’s why Canada Post settled on naming its facility after Albert Jackson, who’s also believed to be the first Black letter carrier in the country.

As previously reported in the Star, when Jackson showed up for his first day on the job in 1882, white postmen refused to show him the rounds, outraged that his rank placed him above some white employees. The incident was debated in the local papers and Toronto’s Black community rallied around Jackson, a former child slave from the United States who had fled north along the Underground Railroad.

Then-prime minister John A. Macdonald, facing intense pressure because it was an election year, intervened and Jackson was given his mail route. He remained a postman until his death in 1918 and, in an obituary, the Toronto Daily Star described Jackson as a “wellknown figure in the downtown district.”

Grandson Lawrence Jackson, who was at the naming ceremony, said he’s “unbelievably happy” by the recognition.

“I couldn’t be more proud of what (Albert Jackson) started,” said the last living grandson. “If he were alive today, working for the post office, the buttons would just jump off his jacket because he loved the postal workers, he loved his job and the people who supported him.”

“He had a dream and the dream has come true,” said Lawrence Jackson. “His dream was to become something … He said, ‘We are equal and we are going to be treated equal.’ ”

Jackson’s legacy was recognized with a poster by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers in 2013. Two years later, a play about him was made. In 2017, a plaque was unveiled at the former site of the Toronto General Post Office. And in 2019, Jackson was commemorated on a stamp.

BUSINESS

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2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/282123525114721

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