News Release Archive
MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS--MARKETABLE TITLES BILL ------------------------------------------------------------ Legislation which will provide certainty to land transactions and tax deeds, and make Nova Scotia a better place to do business was introduced in the Legislature yesterday by Municipal Affairs Minister Sandy Jolly. The Marketable Titles Bill received second reading today. "This legislation will help all Nova Scotians by increasing the certainty of title to land," said the minister. "The essential purpose of this bill is to bring certainty to the law respecting marketable titles and tax deeds where confusion and unpredictability exist now." The bill addresses two issues that have reduced certainty of title, delaying property transactions and compelling property owners to engage in expensive court proceedings to validate their titles. The first issue is the appropriate number of years for a title search. Courts have tended to increase the length of the required title search. This bill fixes the title search period at forty years, the period used in the other provinces with this kind of legislation. A marketable title must have a starting point in a registered document at least forty years old. "The bill does not eliminate any legal interest in land, however old, except for some older unregistered interests," said the minister. "This kind of interest most often arises when someone dies without a will but with heirs. The bill provides a method of protecting these interests with a registered notice." The second issue that the bill addresses is tax deeds. For many years Nova Scotians believed and relied on tax deeds as a good source of title. The law has shifted so dramatically that tax deeds have become very unreliable title documents the minister said. The bill brings the law on tax deeds back into balance. It provides that after six years, a tax deed cannot be challenged for any reason except fraud or if it includes land that was assessed to someone else. This gives a person a year to redeem a property after a tax sale and six years more to challenge a tax sale for the reasons now allowed by the courts. Any right to sue for damages for wrongful sale is preserved. After six years, unless there was a double assessment or fraud, a title that includes a tax deed would not be open to challenge. The bill does not apply to highways, easements and rights of way for utilities or individual's rights of way that are in use, or encumbrances acknowledged in a deed in the chain of title. "This proposed legislation has been developed with the ongoing involvement of the Nova Scotia Barristers Society which is very familiar with the hardship that lack of certainty in this area of property law causes," the minister said. "The society has been a valuable source of assistance. We have also heard from many members of the public who have experienced the kind of problems this bill is intended to address." This bill will help all property owners by increasing the certainty of their title, primarily by eliminating technical objections to title that represent potential rather than real adverse claims. -30- Contact: Chris McCulloch 902-424-7485 jlw Dec. 5, 1995