OTTAWA, Ontario — Every Christmas season, Elizabeth Teasdale sets aside an entire room in her house on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia to store presents for her family’s large holiday gathering. By now, 20 to 30 packages should be stashed away.

This week there were two.

It has not been the most wonderful time of the year.

A strike by more than 50,000 postal workers in Canada is now in its fourth week, threatening to leave empty spaces under many Christmas trees.

After nearly a month without mail, Steven MacKinnon, the country’s federal labor minister, said Friday that he had asked the independent Canada Industrial Relations Board to order strikers back to work if it determines the two sides are at an impasse.

“Canadians are rightly fed up,” he told reporters, adding that service might return as early as next week.

A wide swathe of Canadian residents and businesses has been affected. But the hardest hit have been those in remote communities such as Teasdale’s town of Inverness, where Canada Post is the only delivery option. Even Amazon relies on it.

“We can use our sense of humor, call it a piece of our new reality,” Teasdale said. “We got around COVID and will get around this. It is what it is, I guess.”

For some people in areas with no service other than the post office, the strike’s effects are potentially much more serious than missing Christmas gifts.

A federal mediator said earlier in the week that talks between the postal service and its union were heading in the wrong direction.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canada Post remain far apart on wages and other issues, particularly a plan by the post office to use more part-time workers to expand weekend parcel delivery rather than paying full-time employees overtime.

The post office has offered an 11.5% wage increase over four years, which the union has rejected. Instead, the union has reduced its demand over the same period from 24% to 19%. Canada Post, which faces chronic financial problems, has said it cannot afford such a raise.

Like many Canadians, Teasdale is fast giving up hope that mail service will be restored in time for Christmas shipping. She also does not expect an Amazon order she placed before the walkout to show up before Dec. 25.

Amazon said in a statement that “only a small percentage” of orders placed by Canadians are delivered through Canada Post.

The company added that it had “taken measures to minimize customer impact,” but offered no details.

Teasdale has had to come up with a Plan B.

One of the parcels in her gift room, with two T-shirts, arrived only because she paid an online retailer to ship them to a community at the end of the line for various parcel and courier delivery companies.

From there, she also paid a local courier company, “one of those little local vans,” to take care of the final leg of the journey to her house. The total shipping cost? About 50 Canadian dollars, or $35, she estimated.