OTTAWA—The looming end of urban mail delivery in Canada is a political story this week, but in the long term, it’s a cultural milestone too.

Slowly but surely, we are saying goodbye to daily traditions that brought the outside world — literally — to our doorsteps.

That morning thump at the door announcing the newspaper’s arrival, the sound of the mailbox lid opening and closing — both seem destined to become markers of a bygone time, like department store catalogues or the door-to-door salesmen who also used to arrive at the front step.

These were the sights and sounds of the suburbs in the 20th century. The suburbs are still as important to politicians as they were half a century ago, but it’s worth reflecting on how you can’t reach suburban folks, face to face, at their front door anymore.

Politically speaking, for instance, will we soon see door-to-door canvassing as a relic of the past? Voter enumeration before elections stopped being a doorstep operation more than a decade ago, after all, when the electronic voters’ list took over.

My childhood home was built in the late 1950s and it had a milkbox: a small door in the wall that opened to the outside and inside. Milk was delivered to our homes at one time, I seem to recall, but I remember this portal mainly as a way for children to wriggle into the house if the door was accidentally locked (we rarely locked our doors on purpose in my small town.) By the 1970s, the milkbox was already an anachronism.

Around the same time that milk delivery started winding down, back decks seemed to become more popular than front porches, following a trend that started in the U.S.

Much has been written about the decline of the front porch and all that represented about our changing notions of neighbourhood and community. Air conditioning, telephones, television, roads dominated by automobiles rather than strolling pedestrians — all helped to make the front porch a little-used appendage to suburban houses; gone as the primary site of interaction with the outside world.

A few weeks ago, during the Toronto Centre byelection, I tagged along on a door-to-door canvass and was surprised to see how many people still answered their doors and were pleasant to the uninvited guests at their front steps.

(I’ll spare you the details of the rare, few exceptions to that rule, including one resident who answered the door stark naked, yelling how he would never vote for Justin Trudeau or the Liberals.)

Almost certainly, the fading of the front-door culture is rooted in suspicion of strangers, also an unfortunate feature of modern suburban life, and a million miles away from the 20th century image of smiling neighbours waving to each other from their front porches.

Mayor Rob Ford, who’s had more than a few wild, get-off-my-lawn outbursts, is a perfect symbol of this lamentable decline in suburban culture. As a not-incidental aside, I wonder whether he plans to go door-to-door in future political campaigning? Or would he expect citizens to react as he has when people approach him near his home turf?

Politicians have been furiously scrambling over the past decade or so to compensate for people’s increasing unwillingness to make themselves available at the front door, or on the phone for that matter.

The politicians in Ottawa kept themselves exempt from the do-not-call list so that citizens couldn’t opt out of cold calls from people soliciting their votes or money. (News media and polling companies are also exempt.)

Political strategists of all stripes have told me those emerging party databases are a product of citizens closing themselves off to strangers at the doorstep, figuratively and literally.

The more that people refuse to answer their phones or come to their doors when a politician calls, the more the parties have had to find other ways to know their voters.

The parties have been buying magazine subscription lists, for example, to find out what interests the people inside those homes. But will these subscriptions themselves become relics, when magazines, like the mail, no longer arrive on the doorstep?

What about the direct mail fundraising that has been such a source of small, individual contributions to political parties? Will those postcard-format appeals for dollars even make it from the community mailbox into voters’ homes?

People are still letting the outside world into their homes, but now the main route of entry is through a screen — whether on a television, computer or smartphone.

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The milkbox is no longer the portal into suburban homes. Soon the mailbox, the place to deposit letters, bills and newspapers, will join it as a museum artifact.

Can the politician on the doorstep be far behind?

Ottawa bureau member Susan Delacourt's column appears in Saturday Insight. Her new book is Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & McIntyre). It is availablse for purchase at StarStore.ca/delacourt .

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