The bill had received the assent of the governor. Constitutionally it had thereby become an act. But on Stayner's remonstrance the governor admitted to the colonial office that he should not have given his sanction to it. The act was disallowed by the home government.
The question of franking the correspondence of the provincial governments and of the members of the legislatures was one upon which the legislatures in the several provinces had particularly strong convictions. For a considerable period before 1837, the legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada had not paid their accounts for postage.
The account against Upper Canada, which amounted to £1629, was paid in the beginning of 1837; while the account against Lower Canada was not paid until after the dissolution of the last assembly at the time of the rebellion. It amounted to £4043.
The governor general, Gosford, in reporting the payment of the account of Lower Canada, suggested to the colonial secretary that the sum might be remitted as an act of grace on the part of the imperial government, and he urged that if the home government should not feel warranted in making this concession in its entirety, the correspondence of the governor general and his civil secretary, which embraced all the executive business of the province, might be exempt from postage charges.
Gosford's suggestions were in harmony with the whole character of his administration. Indeed his persistence in his policy of conciliation brought down upon him the distrust of the ultra-Loyalists.
Stayner, to whom Gosford's suggestion was referred, opposed it vigorously. If, he argued, this concession were made to Lower Canada, immediate demands of the same character would be made by the other provinces. This would be followed by requests for the free transmission of members' correspondence, and the post office would speedily find itself in a deficit.
It would be specially inadvisable to grant this privilege to Lower Canada, Stayner averred, as the postage received from that province, after deducting the British packet postage, which was the admitted due of the British post office, barely sufficed to pay the expenses of the service in the province. The revenues from Upper Canada exceeded the expenses by a considerable sum, and any extension of the advantages now enjoyed by Lower Canada, would be at the expense of the upper province.
The first of the annual statements of revenue and expenditure for which the legislatures had been contending for many years was presented to the legislatures on the 17th of January, 1838. The statement contained an undivided account of the operations in Upper and Lower Canada. This was not quite satisfactory to the house in Upper Canada, but as the services for the conveyance of the mails ran from one province into the other, it was impossible to assign accurately to each province its share of the expense for their maintenance.
As the statement showed a surplus of £11,264 for the years 1836-1837, the legislature of Upper Canada saw no reason for hesitating to press its demand that the franking privilege be granted to its members. They went, indeed, much further, and asked that the whole amount of the surplus revenue, which arose from the post office business in Upper Canada, be transferred to them.
In support of their request, the legislature pointed out that, in the imperial act of 1834, it was provided that as soon as the consent of His Majesty should be signified to the bills of the several colonial legislatures, the net revenue from the post office in British North America should be distributed among the several provinces in the proportion indicated by their gross revenues; that the suspension of the legislature in Lower Canada, in consequence of the rebellion, made it impossible to procure joint legislative enactments; and the financial condition of Upper Canada made it necessary that the province should have at its disposal all the means to which it was legally entitled.