On 12 February 1915 the Special War Revenue Act was introduced to help finance the war effort. It imposed a tax levy on many goods and services, including the carriage of mail.
To indicate the appropriate payment of the tax on wines and spirits, the Inland Revenue Department overprinted the blue five-cents Admiral stamp with the inscription WAR TAX, diagonally in black. The olive green twenty-cents and the black fifty-cents stamps were similarly overprinted and released, the latter with the overprint in red. The imposition of the tax in April on medicines and perfumes provided a use for all three values.
The overprinted five, twenty and fifty cents values were intended for fiscal use only, the tax on postal matter being only one cent. Unfortunately, with the requirement for a tax levy on postal money orders and postal notes, which began to be enforced on 15 April, confusion reigned both in the public's and in the authorities' understanding of the correct use of the war tax stamps. Consequently, overprinted WAR TAX stamps began to find their way into postal use, which is perhaps understandable since the stamps were, after all, marked CANADA POSTAGE. Given that it was permissable also to use regular issue postage stamps to indicate payment of the five cents tax levy on wine, for example, it is easy to see how this confusion could have come about.
The situation was not helped by the introduction of specially prepared one- and two-cents War Tax stamps. On 25 March, a directive entitled A Circular to Postmasters, which was headed as follows, was issued:
It went on to state that the payment of the tax would be required beginning 15 April 1915. Additionally, the instruction stipulated that only war tax stamps could be used to meet the tax element of the total charge, which was at variance with the more liberal instructions issued with the WAR TAX overprint stamps for use with wine, etc, as previously explained. The further instruction, that the new war tax stamp was not to be used to pay for the postage element of the total charge, and the release of a two-cents War Tax stamp, which was meant to be used with money orders and the like, and not to indicate payment of postal service taxes, added further fuel to the chaos that ensued.
The authorities hastily relented on 16 April, when it was readily apparent that the use of the postal war tax stamps was never going to be properly implemented. Consequently, the new one- and two-cents War Tax stamps were merely absorbed into general use alongside regular issue postage stamps. The later release of a stamp that combined the 2 + 1c postage and tax rates partly alleviated the problem, particularly in the case of the basic first class forward domestic rate, for which the one cent tax imposition was per mailed item and was not increased for items in excess of single weight. If an item intended for domestic first class mailing weighed two ounces, for example, the total charge would have been five cents (two cents per ounce plus one cent war tax), and the stamps used to indicate payment would likely have been one regular issue two-cents stamp plus one 2 + 1c stamp.
The authors have found that covers with the correct and intended useage of the appropriate stamps are indeed not that common, and misused applications appear far more frequently.
By 20 May, the misuse of the 5, 20 and 50 cent overprints was resolved, and postal use of the WAR TAX overprinted values ceased.
Updated: 5 Oct 97