The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

Owing to failing health, Sutherland retired from the service in 1827. He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Thomas Allen Stayner, the last of the deputies of the postmaster general of England, and in many respects the most notable. Stayner was brought up in the post office, and at the time of his appointment to the position of deputy postmaster general he was in charge of the Quebec post office.

A man of unusual ability, Stayner gained the confidence of his superiors in England, to a degree at no time enjoyed by his predecessors. What was equally important, he managed to keep on good terms with the governments of the two provinces.

When the houses of assembly in Upper and Lower Canada denounced the post office as inefficient and unconstitutional, and proposed to take the management of it into their own hands, the governors and legislative councils in the two provinces took the side of Stayner, and while they urged upon him and the postmaster general the expediency of meeting the reasonable demands of the assemblies, they set their faces steadily against any revolutionary propositions respecting the control of the department.

This attitude was in a measure due to a change in the policy of the postmaster general and his advisers in England. The earlier deputies were held by so tight a rein, and their suggestions and recommendations so little regarded, that they occupied a rôle scarcely more important than that of being the hands and voice of a department, which, unpopular at home on account of its illiberality, aroused general discontent in Canada by adding to its administrative vices, an entire ignorance of the situation with which it had to deal.

At the outset of his administration Stayner's powers were as much restricted as were those of the deputies who preceded him. A few months after his appointment, he opened a post office at Guelph. He assured the postmaster general that he had not done so until he had satisfied himself that the prospective revenue would more than meet the expense. But he did not escape a warning and an intimation that the departmental approval would depend on the financial results.

Shortly afterwards, Stayner established an additional courier on the route between St. John and St. Andrews in New Brunswick, the point at which the mails between the Maritime provinces and the United States were exchanged. This action, though most desirable in the public interest, brought down upon him a rebuke, and a reminder that the postmaster general's sanction must be obtained in all possible cases, before lines of communication were opened which were attended with expense.

The circumstances of the country were making a continuance of this repressive course impossible. Settlements were springing up too rapidly, and the demands for postal facilities were becoming too insistent to leave it possible to delay these demands until formal sanction was obtained from England. In November 1829, Stayner informed the postmaster general that, in Upper Canada, the lieutenant governor, the legislature, the merchants, and indeed the whole population, were calling for increased postal accommodation.

In the United States, Stayner pointed out, almost every town and village had a daily mail, and this excited discontent with the comparative infrequency of the Canadian service. He suggested that he be allowed to expand the service, and to increase the frequency of the courier's trips, wherever he was convinced that the ensuing augmentation of correspondence would more than meet the additional expense.

Stayner had been so fortunate as to impress the postmaster general with the fact that a very considerable discretion might safely be left with him. Besides this, the postmaster general was under a growing sense of the insecurity of the legal foundations of the post office in the colonies. To Stayner's gratification he received a letter from the postmaster general[211] enjoining him to make it his study to extend the system of communication in all directions where the increase of population and the formation of new towns and settlements seemed to justify it.

This was a wise step. It gave the department a representative, zealous in its interests, as intimately acquainted with local conditions as the assemblies themselves, and thoroughly competent to undertake the responsibility devolving upon him.