Hi.
I'm Kirk Rintoul and today we're talking about the basis of legal descriptions, which, as
you know, if you're buying a property, in lawyer's office we're searching title, we
don’t go by the municipal address.
If it's 86 Cherry Street, that’s a mailing address.
It's the legal description that counts, and those are on the documents that transfer the
title and we're doing our title search based on the legal description.
Historically, the province of Ontario, huge area in terms administratively, so it was
broken down into counties in southern Ontario and districts up in northern Ontario.
There were not cities at that point in time in the 1790s when people came out, so people
were essentially buying farms in what was called Upper Canada.
The government of the day, they sent out teams of surveyors out and they survived townships
because the counties or districts were divided into townships.
A lot of them were regular shapes like rectangular, so I'm just going to draw boundaries of our
township.
The surveyors used something called a Gunter's chain, which was 66 feet, and they measured
out in the townships big lines, which we call concession lines, and they ran like this.
They would do 100 chains, which would be 6600 feet.
That’s about a mile and a quarter.
This was 100, this would be the first concession.
Then they'd do 1 chain here in between the concessions.
They do another 100 and they do 1 chain.
That 1 chain is 66 feet.
Then they continue all the way along here, and we're laying out our township.
On the old maps, they're numbered with Roman Numerals, I, II, III, IV, V.
These are not farms, these are very big pieces of property.
What they did was they measured in the other direction and they measured 20 chains and
they put in … These are lot lines to divide this up into lots.
They went this way.
They also put road allowances in many cases this way as well.
The road allowance is 66 feet wide.
They divide off our township into these original farm lots, these farm lots all the way along
here.
These farm lots are about 200 acres.
Most people coming out before you had tractors and motorized machinery, 200 acres was too
big a farm.
People couldn’t afford it and it was difficult to farm that.
Usually, they would buy half of the lot or a quarter of the lot, which would be 100 acres
or 50 acres.
This grid is our basis of the legal description, so if we're in the county of Simcoe, let's
say township of Nottawasaga … You can't read my writing anyway … we go by the legal
description and we've numbered this the other way, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 here, and pretend that
we've done all the way along.
This becomes the basis of our legal description, so if we're describing this piece of property
and it's being conveyed, this would be lot 1, concession 1, township of Nottawasaga,
county of Simcoe.
The question is, what would this one be?
We're in the second concession, but it's numbered number 1, so this would be lot 1, concession
2, township of Nottawasaga, county of Simcoe, and this would be lot 2, concession 2 and
so on.
Your grid is the basis of the legal description and this is where you're searching title from
that legal description.
I had mentioned that people purchased half a lot, so you might be buying the north half
or the south half.
If you're buying this piece of property here, let's say north is up here, you're buying
the north half and that would be on the deed, the north half of lot 1, concession 1.
This wouldn’t be lot 1.
This would be lot 1, concession 5, township of Nottawasaga, county of Simcoe.
If you continue with the readings, legal descriptions become fairly complicated because people have
irregular boundaries on property.
As people moved out, farmer might have a couple of sons, he subdivides the land, maybe buys
a little piece of his neighbor's adjoining land, so what we end up with is what's called
metes and bounds description.
Those are the boundaries described with respect to astronomical directions, but they commence
at a starting point because once you start subdividing land, it becomes more and more
complicated in terms of describing just a little piece of the property.
Part of this farm might be conveyed to build a post office or something like that or a
school, and how do you describe that little corner of the property?
That’s where you would normally get into a more complicated metes and bounds description.
If you continue on with your readings, it gets into plans of subdivision and reference
plans, but these are all superimposed on these original lots and concessions.
You may ask the question what about city, city of Toronto?
Once the city boundaries … Say city of Toronto starts down at the lake, it takes over part
of this property, legal description would change.
We'd no longer talk about the township of Nottawasaga, we'd substitute city of Toronto
instead of that.
There could be legal descriptions with respect to a reference plan or a plan of subdivision,
which we will be talking about in this course.
Okay, thank you.
We'll be continuing on with the full essentials of legal descriptions.
Oh, there's one thing I wanted to mention.
The road allowances, 66 feet wide, are important because it's a road allowance, which means
it's space to put in the road.
They didn’t have the money to build roads in a complete grid initially, so they only
put roads in certain places, but they left room for the road allowances because they
might put in a road and they wanted the freedom to do that.
Why is that significant?
What if I built my farmhouse on the road allowance?
It's not my property.
It's a problem with respect to title because it encroaches on a highway, and even if it's
in the registry system, it doesn’t matter how long it's been there, you can't acquire
title through possession by camping out on essentially what is a highway.
You can never acquire the title to that by way of squatter's rights no matter how long
you’ve been there.