2006 - Building Relationships
When Stephen Green
assumed the presidency of the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association, he said that
building relationships and networking and then one-to-one communication is the
cornerstone of acquiring, retaining and developing clients in most of their
businesses and that the Association needed to transfer some of this thinking as
it moved towards a preferred future for Alberta Land Surveyors and the Alberta
Land Surveyors' Association. President
Green said that it is crucial for the Association to build and sustain
relationships with other technical and professional groups that deal with
geomatics, government and educational institutions.
When Stephen Green stepped down as
president a year later, he reflected on what the Association had done to build
relationships and increase its level of communication. In
2005-2006, the Alberta Land Surveyors'
Association joined the organization known as CAPP, the Canadian Association of
Petroleum Producers. This allowed Alberta Land Surveyors to serve on two
critical CAPP committees – the CAPP Geomatics Committee and the CAPP Resource
Access Committee. Both of these committees asked for the Alberta Land Surveyors'
Association’s opinion on survey matters related to the oil and gas industry.
President Green,
through Council, invited the Director of Surveys to attend all future Council
meetings in order for him to report on his activities and increase the level of
communication.
Throughout the year, the Alberta Land Surveyors'
Association had an opportunity to meet with a number of provincial government
ministers to discuss issues such as public lands disposition mapping and
proposed amendments to amend the Surveys Act passed at the
2005 Annual General Meeting. The
Alberta Land Surveyors' Association was also active in meeting with
quasi-government organizations such as the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board,
the Special Areas Board (encouraging greater use of technology) and the Canadian
Mortgage and Housing Corporation (discussing their plan to offer title
insurance).
The Alberta Land Surveyors' Association also had extensive
discussions with the University of Calgary and the Association eventually
approved the establishment of a fund in the amount of $90,000 to fund cadastral
research at the University of Calgary. The intent of the cadastral research
program is to support specific projects that are of high quality, innovative and
brought application and relevance to the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association and
its members.
As President Stephen
Green was helping the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association establish and
build new relationships, his company, The Cadastral Group Inc., was establishing
a relationship with Focus Surveys. Focus Surveys bought The Cadastral Group in
early 2006. Focus itself underwent some ownership changes in
2005 as it entered into an equity
partnership with KRG Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Denver,
Colorado. This trend continued in 2006 as the Altus Group Income Fund of Toronto
indirectly acquired All West Surveys.
The interest in Alberta-based survey companies by outside
investors was fuelled by a continued strong provincial economy and a high demand
for land survey services. While there weren’t as many articled students
receiving their commission as the previous year, the Association’s Registration
Committee was kept extremely busy and larger land survey firms scoured the
universities and technical institutions across the country seeking the
relatively few students available. It was not uncommon to hear of students
signing bonus agreements and having multiple job offers.
In spite of this sustained prosperity, there were storm
clouds on the horizon. At the 2006 Annual General Meeting, Alberta Court of
Appeal Justice Jean Cote (grandson of Jean
Leon Cote) outlined several obstacles to continued independence and
self-regulation of a profession. At the same time, the professional engineers
and engineering technologists were making overtures to the Government of Alberta
about the relationship between professionals and technologists and the
governments of Alberta and British Columbia signed a trade agreement in which
they wanted to see a professional in one jurisdiction automatically be licensed
to work in the other.
Within the Association itself,
Lyall Pratt stepped down as Director of
Practice Review after eight years and Fred Cheng was appointed the Association’s
third Director of Practice Review on January 1, 2006. The ALSA added one more
staff member to bring the number of full-time staff to nine.
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- Forward - 2007 - New Acronyms
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