Northern Philately & Postal Service
Tahltan Bear Dog
Dateline: November 14, 2025.
On August 26, 1988, Canada Post issued four postage stamps featuring unique Canadian dog breeds - the Tahltan Bear Dog, Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Canadian Eskimo Dog, and Newfoundland. The stamps were designed by David Nethercott, based on paintings by Mia Lane which show each dog in a typical habitat.
Each of the stamps had a value of 37 cents, and they were printed se-tenant by Ashton-Potter Limited in Toronto, using five-color offset lithography. A total of 3,960,000 were printed.
There are many ways to collect postage stamps. When stamps are printed, each corner of the large sheets used to have an imprint identifying the printer and other information - in this case, the designer and artist. To collectors, each of those corners is called a plate block, and the image below shows a "matched set of plate blocks" from the collection of Murray Lundberg. In May 2014, the Ottawa Philatelic Society published an excellent article about plate blocks, by Hank van der Linde.
Two of these Canadian breeds have strong Yukon connections - the Tahltan Bear Dog came from what is now the Telegraph Creek area, and many were brought to Atlin, Carcross and Teslin in particular. The Canadian Eskimo Dog (now Canadian Inuit Dog) is a specific breed within a type known as Mackenzie River huskies, which were used extensively by freighters and the RCMP in the Yukon and western Arctic.
