New Westminster Office

New Westminster Office

I had a lot of dealings with the New Westminster office, which is the largest property ownership

office in BC. It handles more property ownerships than the rest of the province put together. I

had a discussion with one of the New Westminster officials about a court case in Nelson. He said

that a surveyor’s work was only legal if it was done of the property belonging to the person who

had hired the surveyor. This fellow’s attitude was counter to my own: I always felt that to do the

job properly, the surveyor must check the properties on both sides of the property in question. In

other words, we should not only survey the property of the owner who had hired us. We had to

be sure that the owner’s property was not impinging upon the neighbours on either side and vice

versa. This process worked out quite well when I was doing accretions. I would go to the owners

on either side of the property in question and tell them what I was doing and that I would be

walking on their property, too. And if they wished, I would survey their entire property as well.

And I did several of them. I did one area with four properties in a row.

It was simple: I just explained to the neighbours what I was doing. They would say, “Do mine

too,” and they paid me for this extra work. In one area where I did three properties in a row, I ran

into one owner who was a multimillionaire. He refused to pay me because he said I got more

than enough compensation from the other two owners. These other owners were not as wealthy

as this fellow.

I did a survey at Johnson Road after the Highways Department hired me. I surveyed this whole

stretch of about two miles of a quite valuable property opposite Nelson on the lakeshore, just so

everybody would know where their property line was located. The original survey was done with

wooden posts, likely in the 1930s. So, nobody knew where their property was until I went in and

did the survey at the expense of the Highways Department. Our work defined where all the

properties were. And I think I did a good job.

I encountered one significant problem on this project though. A chap got a building permit to

build a boathouse on a skimpy piece between the highway and the lakeshore. It was not really a

building site, and he never built the boathouse. Instead, he built apartment units. The regional

district even threatened to take him to court to stop him from occupying the new units. He never

did get to occupy it. When I went by recently, it looked like the building has been torn down

finally after thirty years.

There was one place where I got into one heck of an argument with another surveyor related to

the boundary lines associated with these lands. The boundary line on the shoreline is not just an

extension of an upland boundary. You have to determine that the boundary extension is

perpendicular to the shoreline. In this instance, the extension was up on the lake. A surveyor did

the extension, and he did not show consideration for the neighbours. He had the feeling that

when a client hires you, you work for that client without caring too much about the neighbours.

This surveyor surveyed another place. Shortly before he got it registered, I had to do the one next

door. I proved to him that he had gone in the wrong direction. Although he argued with me, he

shifted the boundary by ten feet on the shoreline.

He got heat from his bosses when he followed the rule of determining the line perpendicular to

the trend of the shoreline. In the end, his client decided that it was the right thing to do.