1916 - Town Planning       The 1916 Annual Meeting held at Calgary was a comparatively subdued affair, but the Annual dinner seems to have been a bang-up show, notwithstanding the influence of the war. At the meeting it was decided to maintain on the register without payment of fees the names of those members who joined the armed services during the course of the war, and nothing else of much consequence appears on the records of that meeting. Eventually, before the war ended, twenty-five members of the Association enlisted for active service, and five of those men died in action. They were Lieut. W.M. Carthew of Edmonton, Lieut.-Col. A.J. Latornell of Edmonton, Capt. D.D. MacLeod of Edmonton, Sgt. W.A. Scott, M.M., of Medicine Hat and Lieut. A.J. Tremblay of Edmonton. There were not many other professional organizations in Canada that could show a record of military service to equal this. At the 1916 meeting, Mr. Seymour read a paper on “Town Planning and the Surveyor” in which he discussed the provisions and effectiveness of the primitive and now forgotten Town Planning Act that the provincial Legislature had passed in 1913. Mr. P.N. Johnson followed Mr. Seymour with a paper on the establishment of lines for which no instructions are provided in the Dominion Land Surveys Act. The contents of that paper are as applicable to survey practice today as they were then, and they deserve to be regarded as part of the necessary education of every surveyor. The Annual Dinner, the first to be officially recorded in an annual report, took place under the chairmanship of Mr. J.L. Cote, who had been elected as the new President. After the dinner, no less than seven formal toasts were proposed, honoured, and responded to, interspersed with music supplied by the Hotel Palliser Orchestra and songs delivered by a Mr. Morgan and Mr. L.W. Brockington, who later became better known as an after-dinner speaker than a singer. This exhilarating wingding lasted for almost four hours and report says that everybody greatly enjoyed it which, if true, only goes to show that Alberta Land Surveyors in those days had much more fortitude than they have now. It would seem that the enjoyment of the members of the Entertainment Committee must have been thoroughly extinguished later on, for in the minutes of the next Council meeting, held on December 8th, 1916, the adoption of the following motion is recorded: “That the Council feels it would be a bad precedent to reimburse the Committee of Entertainment for the amount spent by them in excess of the sum previously set by the Council; but the Council desires to place on record its keen appreciation of the excellent provision made for the entertainment of the Association and the generous and efficient action of the Committee.” The Council then appointed a Committee for Entertainment for the 1917 Annual Meeting at Edmonton, and cut their allotment of funds down to $60.00. It was also resolved that that meeting should be limited to one day only. From all this, it would appear that frugality, it not niggardliness, was going to be restored for the duration of the war.   Back - 1915 - A Family Rift Forward - 1917-1918 - ALSA Becomes a Landowner