The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

The committee entered upon their work by calling upon the deputy postmasters general of Canada and the Maritime provinces for a body of statistics and other matter, which, when furnished, provided them with a survey of the whole colonial system, and its methods of operation.

Detailed information was given in tabular form of every post office in the colonies—the name and date of appointment of its postmaster, the revenue of the office, and the several items that composed the postmaster's income; and of every mail route, with its cost of maintenance. All regulations for the guidance of postmasters in the management of their offices were submitted to the commission.

The commissioners addressed circular letters to all the postmasters, and to prominent people in every section of the colonies, inviting them to give their views on the post offices in their locality, and asking particularly as to the extent letters were carried by agencies other than the post office, and their opinions as to why these other agencies were employed in preference to the post office.

The information obtained was most voluminous, and the report of the commission based upon it was comprehensive.[264] It began with a historical sketch of the post office in the colonies, from its origin down to the time of the commission; passed on to a survey of the institution as it then stood; pointed out the defects they discovered in its arrangements; and concluded by a number of recommendations for the removal of the defects, and the improvement of the system.

The defects which most impressed the commissioners were the want of uniformity within the system, and the uncontrolled power of the representatives of the postmaster general in the colonies. As illustrating the lack of uniformity, they pointed out that though the colonies were in postal theory an undivided whole, they were under the control of two deputies of the postmaster general, who were entirely independent of one another, and that no effort seemed to have been made to co-ordinate the practice in the two jurisdictions.

The absence of organization was more noticeable in the Maritime provinces, a condition which the commissioners attributed to the failure of the deputy at Halifax to establish general regulations, and to the want of travelling surveyors or inspectors, who might have introduced uniformity of practice among the postmasters.

A striking instance of unauthorized variation from usual post office practice was the existence of way offices. These were, to all intents and purposes, post offices, and yet they had no official recognition as such.

These way offices were set up at any convenient place along the line of the post roads. They were put in operation, sometimes by local magistrates, or other people of importance in the districts; sometimes by neighbouring postmasters, and sometimes by the deputy postmaster general. They had no accounting relations with the head of the department, but carried on their work under the control of an adjacent postmaster who was held responsible for the postage collected by them.

In spite of their anomalous character, these way offices had a usefulness of their own; for they were not abolished until after the Nova Scotia post office was absorbed in the post office department of the dominion in 1867.

The commission in support of their second conclusion, that the power of the deputies of the postmaster general were subject to no practical control, and that the abuses usually associated with irresponsibility were not absent from the administration of the colonial post office, submitted two cases which had come under their notice, and which seemed to show that in these cases at least Stayner was chargeable with maladministration and nepotism.