As the law officers' ingenuity was not equal to the difficulty, the situation remained essentially unchanged for some years. Meantime Stayner was enjoying to the full the peace and quiet which followed upon the altered conditions in the two provincial assemblies. It was some years since he had heard a complimentary reference to himself in either house, though no man could have shown more zeal for the improvement of the service he administered. But an agreeable change was at hand. On February 17, 1837, the legislative council of Upper Canada had before it the report of a committee it had appointed to inquire into the post office. The chairman of the committee was John Macaulay, formerly postmaster of Kingston, and Stayner's chief support in Upper Canada. When there was a question of appointing an assistant deputy postmaster general for Upper Canada, it was Macaulay that Stayner desired for the position. The burden of the report of the committee of the council of 1837 was that the interests of the several provinces could be maintained only by preserving to the post office its character as an imperial institution. In Stayner's hands the service would be carried on efficiently, now that he had been furnished with the assistance he had applied for. Indeed the magnitude of his labour could be understood only by those connected with the service. The committee drew up a series of conditions which they considered would place the institution on an efficient footing. The conditions were very similar to those suggested by the legislative council of Lower Canada in 1836. The bill of the Lower Canadian assembly appeared to the committee to illustrate the impracticability of any scheme such as that proposed by the imperial government in 1834. If the acceptance of a post office bill was left to the provincial legislatures, they would almost certainly insist upon a scheme of low rates, based entirely on local considerations. The excessively reduced scale of rates proposed by the Lower Canadian assembly could not fail to leave a large deficit. Hence the wisdom of leaving the rates as they stood until their effects could be seen. Ten days after the committee of the legislative council made its report, the house of assembly adopted an address to the king, in which the same ideas were embodied, and in the following month a joint address was prepared by the assembly and the legislative council.[252]