1919-1920 - A Protest over Pay Scales

    During 1919, Association affairs became somewhat more animated. It was decided at the Annual Meeting to publish a special Memorial Report to commemorate the services of those Association members who had entered the armed forces during the war, to present a submission to the provincial Attorney General on the need for the appointment of a properly qualified surveyor to the Edmonton Land Titles Office, to file a protest with the provincial government concerning the scale of pay assigned to land surveyors in provincial employ and to send a representative to the DLS Association’s Annual Meeting at Ottawa to press the claims of surveyors in the federal service for a higher classification and rate of pay than had been assigned to them by the Civil Service Commission.

Eventually, the special Memorial report was published in 1922, being incorporated in the Annual Report for that year, which was the first again issued in printed form since 1915. Apparently the submission with reference to the appointment of a surveyor to the Edmonton Land Titles Office got some attention, for in 1920 the Council noted with satisfaction that Mr. M.W. Hopkins had been appointed to that position but in their opinion his salary ought to have been substantially higher. A similar feeling prevailed with regard to the salaries of other surveyors employed by the Province. The minutes of the 1920 Annual Meeting record a discussion of this subject in which it was stated that the current salary for district surveyors employed by the Alberta government was $2,400.00 per year, as compared with $2,880.00 in Manitoba, $2,100.00 in Saskatchewan and $9.00 to $12.00 per day for Dominion Land Surveyors employed by the federal government. The pay range for the Surveyor General of Canada was said to be from $3,900.00 to $4,800.00 per year. It was fairly evident that general dissatisfaction over these pay rates prevailed throughout the country, and this seems to have stimulated the first moves towards togetherness amongst the various surveying organizations that are evident in the Association’s history.

The strength of this co-operative sentiment is indicated by a resolution which was presented on behalf of the Association by its official delegate, Mr. A.G. Stewart, to the 1920 Annual Meeting of the Dominion Land Surveyors Association. This resolution advocated the formation of a national association of land surveyors for the purpose of protecting and advancing the interests and promoting the good and welfare of the land surveying profession and asked the DLS Association to solicit the co-operation of the various associations with that end in view. The DLS Association gave this proposal a favourable reception and immediately set up a committee to study the matter. The committee, on the final day of the DLS Association’s meeting, brought in a report which declared that the profession of the land surveyor is the highest, the most honourable and the oldest profession in the world, and after citing the feats of earlier surveyors who were alleged to have built the St. Clair Tunnel, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the pyramids of Egypt and claiming professional kinship with Christopher Columbus, Amundsen and Scott and the Governor of Alaska, it concluded with a recommendation that the Alberta resolution be adopted. That was done and a committee of five was set up to pursue the matter further. It was a long time before the pursuers attained their goal but finally, in 1934, the organization known as the Canadian Institute of Surveying was formed. Meanwhile, the land surveyors of Canada continued to suffer from the impact of rising prices upon small incomes.

The fact is that in those years the supply of land surveyors far exceeded the demand, and regardless of the professional worth or social value of their activities, their services could readily be bought for the low rates of pay which then prevailed. As Dr. Deville said at the 1918 meeting of DLS Association, “with the war, many land surveyors have seen their private practice go, and as to government work, that has been cut down by hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Ten years later the situation was still much the same. In 1928, the President of the DLS Association, Mr. J.W. Pierce, said “the Dominion Land Surveyor’s work has been gradually disappearing, and today not one-tenth of our members are engaged in actual land surveying.” The surveyors in the provinces were perhaps a little better off, but throughout the period during and between the two wars, any signs of even moderate prosperity in the land surveying business were conspicuous mainly by their absence.

Under those conditions many land surveyors left the profession for other occupations and the number of new entrants to the profession was exceedingly small. In 1919, the year after the first war, when large numbers of returned veterans were taking up civilian careers, the Alberta Association acquired eight new members, but during the next 28 years, only 18 new members were added to the register and many of these were men to whom occasional survey work was only incidental to some other means of livelihood. Since 1950, the resulting deficiency has been made up by the enrollment of over 80 new surveyors, and the estimated average age of Alberta Land Surveyors fell from an elderly 58 in 1950 to a youthful 34 in 1959. It is to be hoped that in the future we can secure in our profession a greater measure of stability and steady growth than in the past, for the public cannot be well served when surveyors are either too few in number to meet current needs or so numerous that severe competition brings about a deterioration of their professional standards and the quality of their work.

In 1920, Mr. B.F. Mitchell succeeded Mr. R.H. Cautley as Secretary-Treasurer and Registrar of the Association, and a verbatim record of the proceedings of the Annual Meeting was made by a legal stenographer. Mr. George MacLeod, a member of the Association who was also a member of the Executive of the Engineering Association, assured the meeting that the engineers had no intention of overriding the statutes affecting land surveyors. He said that most surveyors in private practice were making a large part of their living out of engineering work, and they should be prepared to help the other members of the engineering profession who were not protected by legislation. Surveying, said Mr. MacLeod prophetically, is on the wane and engineering is the great hope of our Association for the future. Later at that meeting, it was agreed that the Association would not oppose the principles of the legislation which the engineers were promoting, but a committee was set up “to watch the bill as it went through the Legislative Assembly and safeguard the interests of land surveyors.”

It was at this meeting that the resolution concerning the formation of a national organization was approved, after another motion recommending that everybody should join the DLS Association had been carried. There seems to have been some confusion as to means, but there was not much doubt as to the end being sought and that was a greater degree of unity amongst land surveyors throughout the country. Mr. Stewart was appointed to travel to Ottawa and to seek support for the Association’s resolution from the Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario associations. It was also agreed that the Alberta Association would provide a sum of money to help pay the costs of organizing a national body of land surveyors. As things turned out, none of the provincial associations took any active part in the matter after the DLS Association adopted the proposal and in the end it was through the agency of that Association alone that the Canadian Institute of Surveying came into existence.

The provincial Public Works Department came in for some criticism on two counts at this meeting. It was felt that the payment to the Department of a $50.00 approval fee on each plan of subdivision, even when only a couple of lots were to be registered, was unreasonable, and a committee was appointed to seek some moderation in this charge. The Department was also criticized for hogging all the municipal road survey work, it being the practice at that time for the Department to make these surveys, afterwards billing the municipalities for half the cost, and also to pay the compensation for the land taken. It was said that the Department did not have enough surveyors on its staff to keep up with the demand for this work, and the members in private practice thought it was about time that their services should be made available to any municipality that might choose to hire them, thus helping to reduce the delay in getting municipal road plans registered and also providing the surveyor with a much-needed source of income. This question was assigned to another committee, and apparently the pressure thus brought to bear was effective, for within a short time the Department saw the light and graciously reduced the approval fee for small subdivisions and eventually turned all municipal road survey work over to the tender mercies of the private surveyors.

This enterprising mood continued throughout the meeting. Mr. Seibert told the members all about the newly-formed Town Planning Institute of Canada, and since any registered land surveyor was eligible to join that organization without the formality of an examination, it was agreed that copies of the Institute’s constitution and by-laws should be sent to all members so that no one would miss the opportunity of becoming a professional town planner. There was also a strong feeling that the Association ought to do something about its unhappy investments. Through mortgage foreclosures, it was now the owner of two farms and a city lot, on which it was paying taxes and other expenses instead of earning revenue, and the incoming Council was instructed to try and cut the Association’s losses as soon as possible. Mr. Knight suggested that one of the farms might be improved to provide a home for worn-out surveyors, but this constructive idea was not even seconded.

This problem got a thorough going over at the next Council meeting, but the Council did not appear to be much perturbed. In the minutes there is a complacent entry to the effect that the general feeling of the Council was that the Association had been quite fortunate in all its investments except the mortgage on the lot in Norwood. However, it was finally decided that the President and Secretary should bend every effort to liquidate these questionable assets, and that the proceeds should be invested in government bonds.

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