First Nations Land Registry

Transcription

1 First Nations Land Registry Making Sense of the ILRS Steven Patterson, Sitka Geomatics Inc.

2 Land Titles a brief history Land titles were traditionally managed within the community, and relied on local landmarks and local knowledge rather than legal surveys Around the late 1940 s, emphasis was put on surveying lots and registering within the ILRS system Many reserves have had renumbering of the same parcels over time, for example 16 acre parcel became lot 32 Many traditional lands were never registered within the ILRS

3 Land Titles a brief history Many of the original land titles were never surveyed, resulting in many overlaps with newly created parcels Some of the land titles did not have proper reference for the original metes and bounds descriptions Few elders left that remember the details of some of the earlier land transactions Difficult to obtain paper documentation of transfers; BCR documents often archived in hardcopy format, if they exist at all

4 Land Titles are they important? Economist Hernando de Soto puts this into perspective very well The value of assets largely relies on the security of the documentation and title This relies on documentation and standardization within the public legal system (land registry) Assets may then be leveraged for access to credit and a modern market economy

5 Taking inventory GIS can be used to compare the spatial cadastral data maintained by NRCAN to the active titles in the ILRS This will quickly identify errors, as well as unsurveyed interests In some cases, registered lands may not agree with traditional lands; this must be looked at on a case by case basis

6 Cadastral Data NRCAN publishes cadastral parcel framework for all of the reserves in Canada

7 Cadastral Data Users have a choice between DWG (AutoCAD) or SHP (ArcGIS) files Data organized by reserve name, so may need to download several if more than one populated IR

8 Cadastral Data Shapefiles are organized into several feature classes For building fully attributed Cadastre we want the Land_Parcel feature class

9 Land titles ILRS Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development maintains land records (for non land code or 53/60 communities) within the Indian Land Registry System (ILRS)

10 Land titles - Ownership For reserve wide ownership, select EOT (Evidence of Title)

11 Land titles - Ownership Select Band/First Nation Set advanced criteria to EOT Active

12 Land titles - Ownership Since we left all other search criteria blank, the search will return ALL active land titles in the ILRS for the selected community From the search results screen, select Export

13 Land titles - Ownership Save as an Excel table To use as a join table, we will need to remove unnecessary formatting There is some information about the search criteria, this is useful but is really metadata, it has no place in our table

14 Land titles - Ownership One header row of titles, no special characters or spaces in fieldnames Format numeric fields as proper numbers (green flag in corner of cell notifies of error warnings)

15 Land titles Parcels Now we need the parcel information contained within the ILRS From the Lands tab, select the community, and from Advanced Search Criteria EOT active

16 Land titles Parcels Since we left all other search criteria blank, the search will return ALL active parcels in the ILRS From the search results, select export and save as an Excel spreadsheet Clean up the header and fieldnames for use as a database table Format numeric fields

17 Property Identification Number (PIN) NRCAN maintains a PIN for the spatial features, starts with a 1 (ex ) The ILRS maintains another PIN, starting with a 9 (ex ) The parcels report maintains both in the same table, we will link this to the NRCAN spatial features so that we have both in our final cadastral dataset

18 Summary of Joins Parcels report from ILRS NRCAN spatial features EoT report from ILRS

19 Load to File Geodatabase We will need to load all of our data to be used into the same file geodatabase Create a new file geodatabase in ArcCatalog, and right click, Import Load the NRCAN Land_Parcel shapefile, and the two report tables with the cleaned up filenames and table structure

20 Shape to Parcel Report The PIN to NRCan_PIN join is a simple one to one relationship, this can easily be accomplished in ArcMap Export to a new feature class to make the join fields permanent

21 Data Types One caution is that both join fields must be of the same data type; in this example the EoT report from the ILRS stored the NRCan_PIN as a text field, while the Land Parcel spatial table was a double (numeric). If you missed the formatting step in Excel from earlier, recalculate the text column in a new field formatted as double, and use the new field for the join (in this case, NRCAN_PIN2)

22 One to Many With the parcel report added in, we can join to the EoT table using the Legal_Description field Before we can properly execute our ownership table (EoT) join, we must consider that many parcels have more than one owner, either as join tenants or tenants in common This is known as a one to many relationship, and in this case we have many table records that relate to one spatial feature

23 Make Query Table The Make Query Table tool can duplicate spatial features as needed to satisfy this relationship in order to execute the one to many spatial feature duplication, all features must reside in the same geodatabase If the first input is a feature class, then the output structure is also a feature class The shape field must also be added to ensure the output maintains topology Since we will need to run a couple tools concurrently, we will use the model builder application to create our process

24 Make Query Table Load the output of the Land_Parcel and ILRS parcel report join and EoT report from ILRS Now we want to use the Make Table Query, combined with the Copy Features tool in ArcToolbox

25 Make Query Table If all went according to plan, the output should have one spatial feature for every land title record In this example, there are three owners of Lot 61, as well as three registration numbers

26 Fieldnames After two joins, our fieldnames are quite long Another benefit of the geodatabase is the ability to specify a fieldname alias Right click on the geodatabase, select properties, then the Fields tab

27 Results Now we are able to use the cadastral data for reporting and analysis One can quickly identify what lands are private, which are band owned In the event of emergency, or scheduled outages, it is simple to generate a list of affected landowners

28 Results Below is a summary of IR lands by land title type

29 Data Quality Checking More work is likely required to investigate unsurveyed interests Find unmatched queries are useful to show land titles that did not link to a spatial feature These can be investigated further by looking up the original survey plan, available online Traditional land holdings must also be considered, many communities may need a lands committee to review

30 Questions/Comments? Feel free to contact me if you have additional questions or need any assistance, each community may have unique challenges to getting this data together Web: Phone: (250) Thank you for attending!