1921 - The Debate over Tariffs

    For a few years from 1920 onwards, the general tone of the Association’s affairs became somewhat more lively. To meet the costs of the 1921 Annual Meeting, the Council allotted the handsome sum of $160.00 and a crowd of twenty-seven members assembled on that occasion. Although there were few signs of any improvement in general economic conditions or in surveyors’ incomes, the proceedings of the 1921 meeting carry a note of optimism, and the president, Mr. MacLeod, who a year earlier had declared that surveying was on the wane, had now regained enough confidence to say in his presidential address that land surveying was a growing profession that would develop and expand with the development of the province.

Some members felt that the time had come to increase the tariff rates, but those whose practice was mainly in the country areas thought that the current rates were high enough. It was also argued that in order to compete with the government on municipal survey work, the private practice rates should not be increased until such time as higher salary rates were obtained for government surveyors. It was finally suggested that the surveyors practicing in Edmonton and Calgary should agree among themselves on a local tariff of rates for surveys performed within those cities.

There was some controversy as to whether the Council or the Annual Meeting had the control of the Association’s funds, which was settled with the passage of By-law No. 2(2).

A special committee reported that it had submitted a brief to the Director of Surveys and the Minister of Public Works regarding the salaries of provincial government surveyors and had discussed the matter with Mr. J.L. Cote who since 1909 had been a member of the Legislature and then held the office of provincial secretary. Subsequently some improvement in those salaries had been made, but Mr. MacLeod, in reporting for the committee, said he could not claim they were due to the Association’s activity and in any case they were still far short of what was necessary and proper. He and some other members seemed to favour the idea of including a minimum salary rate as well as minimum private practice rates in the Association’s tariff, and subjecting to disciplinary action any member who accepted a position at a lesser salary. It was also suggested that the standards of entry to the land surveying profession ought to be raised so that, as one member bluntly put it, it would be more difficult to get into and there would be less danger of an oversupply of qualified surveyors. These somewhat unrealistic proposals, however, received no general support, and no further action on the question of salary rates was taken. However, a committee was set up to review the examination syllabus and appraise the adequacy of its standards and subject matter.

Mr. Stewart, who had accomplished his mission to Ottawa in 1920, reported the very able presentation he had made to the DLS Association with the results already described. He had visited the Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan associations on his return trip to Edmonton, and subsequently they had communicated their views on the formation of a national body to the Secretary of the Alberta Association. Ontario and Manitoba were apparently in favour of the proposal, but Saskatchewan went off on a tangent and suggested instead the formation of a joint organization for the surveyors of the prairie provinces only. This caused some consternation at the 1921 Alberta meeting. It was strongly felt that since all the provinces, as well as Ontario and British Columbia, would soon have administrative control of their natural resources, they would all be on a similar footing as far as basic survey work was concerned, and with that in common, a national and not a regional survey organization was what the facts of the situation called for.

Meanwhile, the Engineering Institute of Canada had been informed about the proposal to establish a national surveyors’ organization, and they, too, drew a red herring across the trail by suggesting that such a body should be a branch of the Engineering Institute, whereby in pursuit of its aims it could utilize the strength of numbers represented by the much larger engineering profession. This idea may have had certain attractions, but it was indicative of the failure to realize that land surveying is fundamentally a legal and not an engineering function; and in any case most surveyors, although many of them were qualified engineers, had an instinctive aversion to the prospect of submerging the identity of their specialized profession within the conglomeration of occupations embraced by the Engineering Institute. It would appear, too, that at that particular time the ambitions of the engineering profession were being looked upon with some suspicion by both the land surveyors and the architects. The president stated at the meeting that in their efforts to obtain the passage of provincial professional acts, the engineers had been hindered by the fears of both those professions that their spheres of activity would be encroached upon, with the result that the model act originally prepared by the central organization of engineers in Montreal had had man holes punched in it before it reached the provincial legislatures. The professional engineers’ act passed in 1920 by the Alberta Legislature was a very loose and watered-down piece of legislation that gave full protection to the other professions, but in its original form it had given the land surveyors some cause for alarm, and in those circumstances it was hardly to be expected that the surveyors would be willing to have their proposed national body taken under the wing of the Engineering Institute.

A highlight of the 1921 meeting was a paper presented by Mr. R.W. Cautley on “The Provincial Control of Natural Resources as it affects the Status and Work of Land Surveyors.” Mr. Cautley pointed out that although the Province of Alberta had developed rapidly since its formation fifteen years earlier and now had a population of 625,000, the surface had barely been scratched and a much greater development of both agriculture and industry could be anticipated. This implied an expanded and more intensified occupancy of land, with a consequent need for a continuing survey program, demanding greater care and precision than ever before, which would have to be kept going in advance of settlement and development. This would entail heavy government expenditures that might not be recovered until many years later in the form of property taxes and other revenues accruing from land development. From 1913 to 1920, the federal government had spent annually an average sum of $750,000.00 on land surveys, of which Mr. Cautley estimated that almost half had been spent in Alberta. In view of the relatively limited financial resources of the province and the comparatively short-sighted and narrow-minded attitude of provincial legislators, he thought it very unlikely that anything approaching that scale of expenditure would be continued if the province assumed control of its resources. He was therefore firmly of the opinion that there should be no provincial survey departments at all, but one federal department for the whole of Canada, that all qualified surveyors should hold commissions as Canadian Land Surveyors and that all survey operations normally undertaken by the governments should be carried out by this central agency, financed partly by federal funds and partly by a first charge upon the lands involved at the time of their alienation from the Crown. He admitted that this was a visionary and improbable arrangement, but it was what could and should be done if the provinces were not so aggressively independent and provincial politicians were not so jealous of their rights of control over public expenditures affecting the provincial economy.

Mr. Cautley was not at all optimistic about the effectiveness of any other arrangement. He thought that if and when the prairie provinces obtained control of their resources, land survey work should as much as possible be delegated to the surveyors in private practice and that this would come about in any event because the provincial governments would not be prepared to maintain salaried surveyors in sufficient numbers to handle all the work that would be demanded of them. Surveyors in private practice could therefore look forward to a considerable increase in their activities, which would be to their financial benefit and would improve their status in the eyes of the public, and they ought to prepare themselves, both individually and as a professional body, for the new social and technical demands which would thus be imposed upon them.

There was some possibly intentional inconsistencies in Mr. Cautley’s arguments with the result that his paper generated considerable discussion and some differences of opinion, and the meeting debated the administration of the province’s resources as though it were the Legislature itself. Finally, a committee was set up to keep an eye on future developments, and there seemed to be hope that a brighter future for land surveyors was not far distant.

The other business transacted at the 1921 meeting included a proposal to have incoming officers nominated by a committee in advance of the meeting instead of from the floor (which was voted down), a suggestion that rubber-stamped instead of hand-printed surveyor’s affidavits on subdivision plans should be accepted (which the Legislative Committee afterwards failed to sell to the Attorney General’s Department), and a request that the requirement for public reserves in new subdivisions, then five per cent of the area subdivided or not less than two acres, be changed to a straight five per cent in subdivisions of more than ten acres, with no reserves in subdivisions of lesser area. This last recommendation was adopted, but there is no subsequent record of what happened to it. In any event, the regulations remained unaltered.

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