paper it will be impossible for me to lay before Mr. 
Butler such plans of the Province as will exhibit the 
vacant crown lands with any degree of accuracy and 
this deficiency of information will be the more apparent 
as Upper Canada has been carefully surveyed and very 
excellent compilations made therefrom". 
Ten years later, in 1848 little progress had been made and 
Baillie was quite desperate about the system. In a letter to Privy 
Council he had this to say 
"...the present system, if system it can be called, of 
surveying isolated lots of land by separate and often ill 
connected surveys, has presented to my mind only a 
complete mass of confusion, but having repeatedly 
represented the evil effects which must at some future 
period inevitably ensure, I felt that I had done my 
duty". 
2.1 The "20 Chain" Map Series 
It was nearly one hundred years later (1944) in the Brief on 
"Forestry and Post-war Reconstitution in New Brunswick" 
(Burchill 1944) that the need for a province-wide map series 
was recommended and acted upon. It had this to say: 
"WHAT MUST BE DONE 
To take advantage of the "opportunity" and remedy the 
faults of the "present situation," action is necessary by 
both government and industry. The plan of action 
which we recommend includes certain projects which 
should be carried out as soon as men and equipment 
are available. 
Among these are: 
1. Aerial photographs and maps of the whole 
province..." 
Soon after the report was published, the project to map the 
whole territory was begun, and 10 years later, for the first time 
in history, the province had a series of maps at the scale of 
1 inch = 20 chains. 
2.2 The Orthophoto Series 
Toward the end of the 1960's, the series of post-war maps 
could no longer meet the New Brunswick needs. It had to be 
revised. Even though the best technology of the day had been 
used, its accuracy no longer corresponded with current needs. 
This was partly because of the imprecise control survey network 
and the rather unsophisticated methods of mechanical 
adjustment and compilation of topographic features. 
From 1960 to 1963, the primary control survey network was 
densified (Hamilton 1974), and from 1969 to 1972, a secondary 
control survey network was established. Aerotriangulation, 
adjustment, and photogrammetric methods had developed 
considerably. A decision was made, therefore, to produce a 
new base map series instead of revising the series of post-war 
maps. 
After reflecting on the matter for several years, in 1971, the 
decision was made to go ahead with an orthophotographic base 
map at the scale of 1:10 000. Three versions were produced: 
1) the planimetric maps, to which were added certain themes 
such as hydrography through the use of photogrammetry, 
symbols representing monuments, etc.; 
2) the hypsographic maps with 5 metre contour lines; and 
3) the property maps. 
It should not be surprising that the orthophoto was chosen as the 
basic map. One need simply to remember that, toward the end 
of the 1960's, Canadian social democracy had reached its peak, 
It was probably the first time in Canada that insistence was so 
firm on the importance of acquiring a tool, being the 
orthophoto, that the public could understand, a tool that would 
enable us to communicate with it, as well as encourage the 
public to participate in and contribute to the decision-making 
process. It was the backdrop against which the link between the 
public and spatial information was established. Implementation 
of the orthophoto meant more than recognizing the public's 
right to spatial information; it meant giving it the tools of access 
to information, offering it directly products that everyone could 
comprehend. The orthophoto's success was extraordinary 
(Castonguay 1984). 
Although the public was enchanted by the orthophoto, in the 
1980's in most cases Canadian administrators of geomatics 
programs shrank back from the social viewpoint and encouraged 
a return to standard map making. 
During the 1970's and early 1980's, the digital representation 
became more and more popular. Digital topographical 
conventional maps were sold with the promise that revision 
would be economical and that it would help us to handle all 
kinds of spatial questions. The orthophoto, even though 
digitally produced, did not lend itself well to revision. The 
decision was therefore to produce a new base map series. 
2.3 The Digital Topographic Base Series 
In 1983, New Brunswick embarked on a program to create a 
digital topographic base according to a standard equivalent to 
the production of maps at the scale of 1:10 000. The data base 
is to be completed in 1994. But now, in some regions (Figure 
2-1), this data base is already 10 years old. Unless the data is 
updated, the investment of over $10 million will lose more and 
more of its value. 
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