1946 - Beyond Capacity       By the end of 1945, the Association membership had increased to forty-one. Only about twenty of these surveyors were in active private practice, the rest being salaried men and life members who did little private work. During the preceding fifteen years, only six surveyors had been added to the number of those in private practice and two of these were men who had originally become registered several years earlier and after a lapse of membership had resumed practice during the war. By this time, the demand for private survey work had grown far beyond the capacity of this limited number of private practitioners, with the result that many property surveys were being carried out by unauthorized persons at prices considerably less than those charged by registered land surveyors and with an equally low standard of care and accuracy. In an attempt to counteract this trend, the Council resolved to indulge in a publicity effort bringing attention to the advisability of having building sites and other property surveys carried out by qualified land surveyors, even though the available qualified men were obviously too few and too busy and, in the eyes of many property owners and some mortgage companies, too high-priced to compete effectively in that field. The futility of this action was later realized and it was not followed up, although the Association did approach the civic authorities at Edmonton and Calgary and extracted from them some assurances that they would look with disfavour upon any civic employees whose extra-mural activities included property survey work. Meanwhile, the Secretary-Treasurer had prepared and started to distribute three printed pamphlets on "Qualifications for Admission to Practice," "Future Prospects in the Surveying Profession" and "Land Surveying as a Career for Ex-service Men," principally to relieve himself of the chore of writing individual letters providing this information to the many inquirers who were thinking of becoming land surveyors. This material, primarily intended for the benefit of Canadian veterans, later got into the hands of the Canadian immigration authorities, who copied it and gave it wide distribution in Britain and Europe, which brought a further flood of inquiries from intending immigrants and displaced persons across the Atlantic and gave the Secretary plenty to think about but did nothing to relieve the current shortage of surveyors in the province. The main stumbling block in getting that problem solved was the inability or unwillingness of the surveyors in private practice to offer steady employment to prospective articled pupils. The typical private survey firm was still a one-man effort, aided by field assistants who were generally employed on a casual basis at a daily or hourly wage and often relying on drafting services provided as a spare-time side-line by draftsmen who were regularly employed in government offices or elsewhere. In spite of the heavy current demand for survey work, the private surveyors were still somewhat Depression-minded, and lacking confidence in the continuance of comparative prosperity they had not yet organized themselves to operate on anything more than a day-to-day basis. In that frame of mind, they remained reluctant to assume the responsibility of engaging articled pupils, and the few students who did manage to enter into articles were those who, as in previous years, were in regular employment with the government or the railway companies. Before long, however, it became evident that if the private surveyors were to get their share of competent assistants in the face of the competition presented by other employers during the post-war upsurge of activity in engineering, construction and other technical fields of work, they would be obliged to offer not only steady employment to the men they hired but also the prospect of future advancement through articled pupilage. For the time being, the Association seemed content to leave it mainly to the government to bring new blood into the profession. At the 1946 Annual Meeting, the recruitment of young surveyors came in for lengthy discussion, resulting in the adoption of the following resolution: Whereas the rate of recruitment of young land surveyors has not for some years equalled the rate of retirement of older surveyors from active practice, be it resolved that the Association continue to publicize this fact and supply information regarding qualifications to practice to young men of suitable ability; and that the officials of the Surveys Branch of the Provincial Government be requested to co-operate in this matter wherever possible by employing suitably qualified young men as articled pupils to government surveyors on their field parties. This was not too realistic, considering that the Survey Branch at that time employed only four district surveyors and had practically no hope of employing more in view of the depressed standard of government salaries which then prevailed and the highly lucrative state of private practice. Even these few could not depend on retaining assistants of any ability, for the wages of government survey fieldmen were equally poor and winter lay-offs were still the order of the day. There were simply no young men around who were sufficiently dedicated to go through the difficult process of qualifying themselves as land surveyors under those conditions when so many easier and better-paid jobs were to be had. At this meeting, the Secretary-Treasurer was happy to report that the Association's assets in the form of provincial government bonds had become unfrozen as a result of the debt refunding scheme which had been offered to bondholders in 1945. Two bonds having a face value of $500.00 each, which had matured in 1939, were surrendered for a cash payment of $1,203.11 to cover principal and compensation for unpaid interest, while other provincial bonds, not yet matured, had been exchanged for a new issue of the same par value bearing interest at 3.5%, and as compensation for loss of interest during the preceding years, the Association would receive an annual payment of some $260.00 over the next five years. Thus, with assets of nearly $3,000.00 and a bank balance which, through the sale of manuals and bond interest compensation, amounted to nearly $1,400.00, the Association's finances had attained a much healthier condition than they had enjoyed for many years.   Back - 1943-1945 - Land Surveying in Rehabilitation Forward - 1947 - Oil and the Land Surveyor