The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

While Mackenzie was in England, Joseph Hume secured the production of a number of documents relating to the Canadian post office, which the legislatures in Canada had tried in vain to obtain from Stayner. Among these was a statement showing the amount paid by the several newspaper publishers for the distribution of their papers by the post office. On looking over the list Mackenzie was surprised at the very moderate amounts paid by publishers of some of the most widely-circulated papers. The Montreal Gazette, for instance, distributed nearly two thousand copies by post, but paid postage on only two hundred and fifty copies.

Mackenzie made some further inquiries, and found that all sorts of irregularities prevailed, which Stayner in the weakness of his position was fain to connive at. The publisher of one paper in Kingston told Mackenzie that he entered seventy-five copies as sent by post, while mailing four hundred copies; another reported sixty copies and sent three hundred. A third publisher, who objected to paying the usual charge of four shillings per copy per annum, was let off with two shillings and sixpence per copy; while a fourth publisher paid no postage at all for several years.

Until that time Mackenzie had been paying the regular charges for all copies of his newspaper—The Colonial Advocate—which he sent by mail. But he determined to be no longer the victim of such barefaced discrimination, and he accordingly began to enter for postage only a part of the total issue distributed through the mails.

In order that he might not be open to a charge of dishonesty, and perhaps also to help in the exposure of a vicious system, Mackenzie told the postmaster at Toronto what he was doing, and at the same time published the facts in his newspaper. This, of course, could not be tolerated by Stayner, and he demanded from Mackenzie the full postage on all his papers sent through the mails.

Mackenzie refused to pay, but declared that if Stayner would allow the case to go before a jury in Toronto, Stayner might employ all the counsel in the colony to support his demand, and if the jury could be persuaded to render a verdict against him, he pledged himself to pay the demand and all expenses. The offer was, of course, declined and the claim was dropped.

In the course of a long examination, Stayner was taken over all the points in controversy between the postmaster general and the Canadian provinces. Dr. O'Callaghan,[246] who soon afterwards acquired notoriety as a leader in the rebellion, was chairman of the committee. He and his associates in the inquiry had sat on several earlier committees and were well versed in the points at issue.

With the aid of the documents produced, the O'Callaghan committee managed to elicit from Stayner a fairly complete statement of the position of the post office in the Canadas in 1834-1835. Asked as to his authority for appropriating to his own use the proceeds of the newspaper postage, he was unable to point to it. But he stated that he knew it had been repeatedly recognized by the head of the department in London, and he had never considered it incumbent upon him or even proper to inquire into the date or form of the authority.

To a committee convinced that everything appertaining to the post office bore the marks of illegality, this answer could not be satisfactory. Stayner was consequently next asked whether he considered that any usage, precedent or custom could give him a right to tax any portion of His Majesty's subjects without the express consent of parliament. To this he replied in the negative, but added that he never doubted that the postmaster general, in permitting his deputy in Canada to send newspapers through the post for a compensation to himself, was borne out by law.

What the statute was which the postmaster general held to be his authority, Stayner could not, with confidence, say. But it occurred to him that it might be an act passed in 1763,[247] which confirmed certain officers attached to the principal secretaries of state and to the postmaster general, in the privilege which they long enjoyed of franking newspapers and other printed matter.

As a matter of fact, this was the statute cited by the postmaster general when required to produce his authority for allowing Stayner and other deputies to treat the proceeds from newspapers as their perquisites, and as we consider this act, we may admire the prudence with which Stayner declined an argument as to its sufficiency as authority for the practice.