Why did Canada Post not let me have an intl. parcel sent by regular surface mail?

Factual Questions
1

I recently started the process of having my remaining personal effects in my parents’ house (in Richmond Hill, ON), sent to me to Prague, Czech Republic. My father prepared three batches of them which he roughly weighed at 4, 10, and 10 KG respectively. My plan was to have these shipped with the cheapest option, which in the past had been standard surface mail.

However, when I went on Canada Post’s online price calculator, the cheapest option it would give me was “Xpresspost”, the price of which was exorbitant. As I’m not currently in Canada, I couldn’t check the options with a local post office. Long story short, I asked on Canada Post’s FB profile and they claimed that standard shipping was still an option. So I asked a friend of a friend to retrieve the smallest of the three packages and mail it to me.

But when my contact got to the post office, they apparently gave him as the cheapest quote the Xpresspost option again. Reluctantly I paid it. It cost me a total of $194 CDN (not counting the box and tape he bought) for a parcel weighing merely 3.397 KG. As I recall, a year or two ago, sending an 8 KG parcel to Prague by surface mail cost half that.

There’s no way I can afford to have the other roughly 20 KG worth of things sent at that rate. Fortunately the bulk of it is file folders full of various papers and I know some of them can be discarded (my father will eventually inventory them for me).

That said, I don’t have money to burn one way or another. Before the final package is prepared for the next (and hopefully last) batch to be sent, I do want to find out if I haven’t been unnecessarily been billed for a faster – and more expensive – option. The Canada Post AI claims that the “standard” surface option is still available for Prague. So why didn’t the price calculator and the postal worker quote it to my contact?

Is there a way in which I can definitively confirm whether I can avail myself of a cheaper surface delivery option? Anyone here in the know?

2

Have you investigated air freight?

3

You mean like DHL? I checked their rates. It seemed equally expensive if not more.

I’ll admit I haven’t spent much time comparing rates with different shippers. Perhaps I should do that but first would like to find out if the postal service can still give the service it did in the recent past.

4

Australia and the USA have both stopped international surface mail.

When I was a teenager, we got large boxes of old magazines from the USA – my grandparents sent us Smithsonian, and Arizona Highways, and medical magazines, and home magazines with cooking recipes, all sent by post (and all opened for customs inspection – evidently home-care packages from the USA were less common than home-care packages from Italy).

There are still “shipping forwarders”, and you will be able to get good rates from Canada to the Philippines using a Balikbayan Box Agent. From Canada to Prague I don’t know if you’ll be able to find anything better than FedEx.

5

I use ShipTime, which is a consolidator. You put in your package size, weight, and addresses and it shows you the best price including Canada Post, Purolator, and the big guys like FedEx and UPS.

6

I’ll check that out, thanks.