COVER N. 657 - CANADA

Postmark: Canada Post Postes Canada Toronto ON Toronto's First Post Office 03.11.2025 25

Posted on the 3rd November;  Received in November 2025

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Receiving this one felt pretty good.

Inside a friendly note and never are friendly notes more appreciated or even needed that when one goes through some unfortunate mishap.... Empathy, solidarity, things that are running ever scarcer... By the laws of economics, the scarcer, the more valuable, the pricier... and yet things such as these do not depend on the whims of nature or market.... one does not have to dig a mountain to find them.... they are at the reach of anyone's hand, you just have to get them out of one's own inner ark of treasures, personality, genetic code, whatever you want to call it... 

If only... why is it that the world is so often at the hands not of the best of us, but exactly the opposite, as the 8 o'clock news so unrefutably proves each day...

Thank you so much Jeff. I really appreciated your kid gesture!

Empathy is again at the heart of  the stamps that Jeff fittingly chose to use on his quite nice cover:  a set of  3 "Permanent" stamps issued on  29SEP2015 as the 4th annual issue of the Truth and Reconciliation series started in 2022.

According to the release notes for the first set of stamps in these series, which I took the liberty of extrapolating for the series at large,  the series aims at "encouraging awareness and reflection on the tragic legacy of Indian residential schools and the need for healing and reconciliation."

"Between the 1830s and 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children across Canada were taken from their families and sent to federally created Indian residential schools. They were stripped of their languages, cultures and traditions. Children endured unsafe conditions, disease, and physical, sexual and emotional abuse while at the church-run schools. Thousands of them never made it home. Residential school Survivors continue to experience trauma from their time at the institutions, and that has been passed down to successive generations."

Resorting again to official release notes, the 2025 set features "the Bentwood Box as a tribute to Survivors and a symbol of healing, reconciliation and hope."

"Bentwood boxes are traditional to Canada’s Northwest Coast. Indigenous communities used them as storage boxes for food, medicine or ceremonial regalia, water buckets, burial boxes, canoe tackle boxes and drum boxes. The boxes were also used to steam or cook food by filling them with water and adding hot stones from a fire." 

"The stamps present the Bentwood Box created by Coast Salish artist Luke Marston for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada in 2009. The box travelled with the TRC to its eight national events throughout Canada. People placed personal and often sacred items in it to symbolize their spiritual journey toward healing and as gestures of truth and reconciliation. Photographs, reports, books, drums, knitted baby blankets and beaded regalia were among the thousands of items put in the box."

Further to the postmark applied at Toronto's first Post Office, which I passed by on my short visit to the city, last year, (unfortunately it was a holiday so I couldn’t go inside) a red stamp mark was also applied, reading "City of Toronto U.C. MR. 6 1864".

As far as  Google would tell me this message  "refers to the Upper Canada Act of March 6, 1834 (4 Will. IV, c. 23), which officially incorporated the Town of York as the City of Toronto".

Toronto's First Post Office

oh, and by the way

Happy New Year, Everybody!