1952 - The Big Leap Forward       Although these substantial accessions of new members and articled pupils during 1951 were felt to be sufficient proof that the profession was now growing quickly under its own steam and that the actions which the government had demanded were hardly necessary, the Association had nevertheless become committed to them and, in any case, the demands for legal survey work were still greater than the current members of the Association could meet. The 1952 Annual Meeting, after much debate, therefore endorsed the proposed new legislation and the prospective short course, although still with some misgivings about the admission of candidates without articled training. This uneasiness was later found to be not without justification, for the Board of Examiners, under direction of the General Faculty Council, felt obliged to accept a rather broad interpretation of what constituted acceptable practical experience, with the result that a few candidates who had done no legal survey work at all were deemed to have met the requirements by virtue of past field work on engineering surveys and suchlike into which the establishment of boundaries and questions of legal evidence did not enter. Happily, little or no harm was done in the long run, since those concerned were usually intelligent enough to recognize the deficiencies in their training and to seek advice from the Director of Surveys or other surveyors on problems they encountered later. In fact, most of the formal complaints that arose from time to time during the succeeding years about defective surveys were directed at members who were supposed to have had proper training, and in 1951 and 1952, the Council was much involved with a series of complaints alleging repeated negligence on the part of a Calgary surveyor of long standing, which finally brought about his temporary suspension from practice. This tended to cast some discredit upon the traditional system of articled training as a means of developing technical skill and professional rectitude. The members present at the Annual Meeting, evidently well aware of the fact that good survey work depends as much upon the personal honesty, diligence and conscientiousness of the surveyor as upon his technical ability, spent some time in discussing ways and means of assuring that those who might enter the profession without articled training would be men of integrity. It was agreed that the Board of Examiners be asked to see that proper safeguards were set up in that connection, and at the following session of the Legislature the Act was further amended to require all applicants for registration to produce satisfactory evidence of good character. The short course on survey law and legal survey practice was conducted in April 1952, at the Banff School of Fine Arts, and was attended by some thirty students, most of whom were recent graduates in engineering. Messrs. Holloway, Lester, Hamilton and Glenday gave lectures on the various provincial acts and regulations pertaining to surveys, the Dominion lands system of subdivision, the Torrens system of land registration, the procedures of the Land Titles Office and the writing of descriptions. The students spent half a day on a conducted tour of the Calgary Land Titles Office, where they were given a first-hand explanation of the registration system, and the course wound up with two days of field exercises in the townsite of Banff and at Morley Settlement which were largely devoted to the finding and re-establishment of corners. It was agreed by all concerned that the course had gone well, and among the twenty-four new members who qualified at the spring and fall examinations in 1952, there were twelve who had taken the course. Eleven of these became registered that year and, in 1953, the examinations were belatedly written by three other Banff students whose names were subsequently added to the register. The influx of new members in 1952 increased the Association's membership by nearly 35 per cent, setting an all-time record for annual percentage growth.   Back - 1951 - Desk-Pounding Responses Forward - 1953-1954 - "New Lines of Thought"