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settlement schemes, isolated parcels placed under leasehold in Reserve/Trust areas, and any
circumstance in which a Survey Act survey would take too long or cost too much.
The 14-year leases are of very questionable value. It is clear that they have done nothing to
provide better access to credit (see chapter 3), it is doubtful that there is much of a market in them,
and they provide only limited security of tenure. The option of a 14-year lease may have hampered
the ultimate obtaining of 99-year leases by creating a longer and more complex road to that end. It
is further difficult to justify them as a reasonable response to a lack of well-trained survey staff, as
they have been presented.' One must justify titling in terms of its economic and financial impacts,
and a 14-year lease seems to have little of either. Their widening use appears prompted by an
overemphasis on accuracy and classic ground-survey methods.
As has been noted in consultancy reports going back more than ten years, the surveyor
general's office has insisted on an unnecessarily high and uneconomic standard of accuracy and has
been slow to adopt new methods such as the marking of boundaries on aerial photos for situations with
lower accuracy requirements (e.g., Swedish University of Agriculture 1976; Bruce and Dorner 1982).
While it is sometimes suggested that greater flexibility requires legal changes, the standards of survey
are in regulations which could be changed by the minister. The Survey Act (SECTION 38) does allow
use of aerial photography as a basis for boundaries, provided the surveyor general gives prior written
permission. And section 12 of the Lands and Deeds Registry Act gives the surveyor general the
ability to allow lesser standards of accuracy where a normal survey is impractical, by approving a
sufficiently detailed plan as a basis for registration.
The reason given for the backlog in survey work—a lack of qualified personnel—would lessen
in importance if more appropriate standards and methods of survey are accepted.
A 1993 draft amendment of the Lands and Deeds Registry Act prepared by the MMD
committee on land issues provides for description of land in a document presented for registration to
be by a plan or "verbal description" which satisfies the surveyor general. The verbal description is
too extreme a reaction to the past; what is needed is simply a clear statement of the surveyor general's
legal discretion to utilize whatever survey means appropriate and economic in a particular situation.
This will include use of aerial photography in some situations, but for some work there should soon
be a shift to survey by GPS (global positioning system), which relies on hand-held units to establish
precise position by fixes from multiple satellites. That technology could be particularly important for
isolated parcels in Reserve/Trust lands, where the geodetic network for conventional survey is poorly
developed.
The sketch plans prepared for the 14-year leases and located on the 1:50,000 contour maps
provide a perfectly acceptable standard of accuracy for large parcels of low-value rural land. Based
on broadly accepted international standards, they are an acceptable basis for the registration of 99-year
leases. For urban areas, where access to survey should be relatively easy, the survey should be done
either to Survey Act standards or by aerial photography, which results in some size distortion but is
entirely reliable for boundary verification. There, on more high-value land, 99-year leases should have
been issued, with conditions concerning later upgrading of survey standards. The recommendations
e To some extent, more work is placed on the limited numbers of learned staff, as the volume of turnover is high.