Saskatchewan wrote no relief and no counting rule

Every jurisdiction read in this corpus so far has been asked the same question: when a riba-free purchase puts the financier on the register for a moment on its way to the buyer, does the state charge twice, and if it relieves the extra step, what does it ask before relieving it. Six answers have come back. Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory wrote express provision and asked who the financier was. Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory wrote nothing. Ontario built real anti-double-taxation machinery and asked for a debt and a creditor. British Columbia never wrote the word "loan" into its transfer tax and built a once-only rule around the agreement for sale instead. Quebec put the relief inside the definition of "transfer". Alberta asked whether interest was payable, and then prescribed the affidavit and the fee to go with it. Saskatchewan is the fifth Canadian province read here and the seventh answer, and the interesting thing about it is where the answer is not.

What was read for this entry is the Land Titles Act, 2000, Chapter L-5.1 of the Statutes of Saskatchewan, in the King's Printer consolidation, whole; together with all four regulations that the King's Printer's own free-law catalogue groups under that Act, each read whole. One caveat belongs at the front rather than in a footnote, because it limits everything that follows. Alberta and Quebec both print, in the official text itself, a closed list of the regulations made under the Act, which is what let those entries say a negative finding was exhaustive. This Act prints no such list. The four read here are the four the publisher groups under it, and that is a weaker kind of closure. Both consolidations also say so themselves: "This consolidation is not official and is subject to House amendments" and the rest of the sentence, on the Act; the regulations carry the same disclaimer in shorter form.

Start with what Saskatchewan charges, because a reader arriving from the usual summaries will have been told that Saskatchewan, like Alberta, has no land transfer tax. There is no transfer tax in this Act. There is a charge at the register, and section 118 is the whole of the authority for it. Subsection (1) says the minister may, by order, establish "the fees, charges and taxes payable with respect to all services provided pursuant to this Act". Subsection (2) says: "The minister shall cause notice of the fees, charges and taxes established pursuant to subsection (1) to be published in the Gazette." Subsection (5) makes payment a precondition of anything happening: "The Registrar is not required to perform any function pursuant to this Act or the regulations until the appropriate fee, charge or tax is paid or arrangements for its payment are made."

Read that again for what it does to a reader trying to plan. The amount is not in the Act. It is not in any of the four regulations either. It is in a ministerial order, notice of which goes to the Gazette. Alberta, one province west, printed its transfer levy formula in the statute and its riba-free tariff line in a regulation under a heading naming a mortgage with no payment of interest required. Saskatchewan put the price outside the statute book altogether. This entry therefore states no amount and no rate for Saskatchewan, because the instrument that would carry one was not read. That is not a gap this entry can close by estimating, and it does not try.

What the statute book does carry is the machinery for measuring the thing the charge is calculated on, and that machinery turns out to be the sharpest part of Saskatchewan's answer. Section 46.1 of the Act: "On an application pursuant to section 44 or 46, the value of the new title is deemed to have been attested to in the prescribed circumstances." The prescribing is done in the Land Titles Regulations, 2001, and regulation section 31 (4) is blunt about it: "an application to register a transfer must be accompanied by a sworn affidavit stating the value of the title to be issued". Every transfer, sworn, with a value on it.

Then comes the definition of the word being sworn to, and it closes two doors that matter to a riba-free purchase sequence. The first limb, regulation section 2 (k) (i), defines value where the acquisition is at arm's length as "the value of the cash and the fair market value of cash equivalents, rounded down to the nearest dollar and excluding any amount paid in taxes, that is given in exchange for the title or a grant of the land, free of any trusts and unencumbered by any interests except interests implied pursuant to the Act". The words "free of any trusts and unencumbered by any interests" do real work here. Where a financier holds title for a moment while the buyer holds a beneficial interest, the value to be sworn is the value free of that interest. It cannot be written down to the financier's net position.

The second limb closes the other door, the one a nominal consideration would go through. Regulation section 2 (k) (ii): "if a person acquires a title in a transaction that is not an arm's length transaction, the value of the cash and the fair market value of the cash equivalents, rounded down to the nearest dollar, that would have been given in an arm's length transaction in exchange for the title or a grant of the land". And an arm's length transaction is itself defined, at regulation section 2 (d), as one in which "a change of ownership of property occurs for cash or cash equivalents in an open market, allowing for reasonable exposure to the market, between a willing, unrestricted, unrelated, knowledgeable seller and buyer who are both seeking to maximize their position". A transfer between a financier and the household it is financing is not that. So it is valued at what the open market would have given. Neither leg of a two-transfer sequence can be sworn at a token figure.

The Act's own definition of "transfer" removes the last place a distinction might have hidden. Section 2 (ss): "transfer" means to convey a title pursuant to this Act, whether voluntarily or otherwise and whether for value or otherwise, and includes a Crown grant unless the context requires otherwise. Whether or not anything was paid, it is a transfer, and every transfer arrives with a sworn value.

The financing side of a purchase is measured the same way. Regulation section 40 (3): "Where any of the following interests are to be registered, the application must specify the value of the interest being registered". The first item on that list is "an interest based on a mortgage". The second, named separately from it, is "an interest based on a security pursuant to the Bank Act (Canada)" - the federal statute this corpus has already read for the way it defines interest by function rather than by name. So both halves of a financed purchase reach the register carrying a value: the transfer of the title, and the charge secured on it.

Now the negative finding, and it is a clean one. Nothing in the Act or in any of the four regulations relieves a transfer because it is a financing transfer. The phrase "financial institution" appears zero times in the Act and zero times across all four regulations, so there is no perimeter, because there is nothing for a perimeter to guard. The word "levy" appears zero times in either, which is worth noting only because it is the word Alberta chose for the same event. And no counting rule exists at all: neither "twice" nor "once only" nor "only once" appears anywhere in the Act or the regulations. Ontario headed a section "Tax only paid once"; the Northern Territory stated the counting rule in its own words while writing no exception to it; Saskatchewan's statute book does not contain the concept.

There is one delegated power to exempt, and it should be named rather than left for someone to find. Section 203 (1) (d) lets the minister make regulations "exempting any person or category of persons from complying with all or any provision of this Act". It sits in the conversion Part, and subsection (1) opens by confining the power to the purposes of that Part; the regulations made under the Act contain no exemption of any kind for a financing transfer. What that power might have been used for elsewhere is not something this entry claims to know.

What Saskatchewan has instead of a rule is a discretion, and the distinction is the point. Section 118 (4): "If the Registrar considers it appropriate or necessary, the Registrar may:" and then paragraph (a), "waive any fees, charges or taxes, in whole or in part", with a matching power to refund. Relief is therefore not impossible in Saskatchewan. It is simply not an entitlement, not tied to any stated condition, not evidenced by any prescribed affidavit, and not published as a tariff line. Alberta wrote a test, a form and a fee; Saskatchewan wrote a discretion. Whether that discretion has ever been exercised for a riba-free purchase, or would be, is not knowable from this text, and no published Registrar's procedure, bulletin or fee order was read for this entry.

Against that emptiness, the two places where Saskatchewan says more than any jurisdiction read here. The first is the definition of "mortgage", section 2 (cc): "'mortgage' means a charge on land created for securing payment of money, and includes a hypothecation of that charge and a charge created for securing payment of any annuity, rent charge or sum of money other than a debt or loan". Every mortgage definition read in this corpus until now has been debt-shaped. Alberta's was a charge created merely for securing a debt or loan. Ontario asked for a debt and a creditor. Quebec asked whether a transfer was for the purpose only of securing a debt. Saskatchewan's definition expressly extends to a charge securing an annuity, a rent charge, or a sum of money that is not a debt or a loan at all - which is the shape a deferred purchase price or a rental stream takes. It is the first mortgage definition read anywhere here that reaches past a debt on its face. What follows from that for any particular arrangement is a question about that arrangement's instrument and not about this Act, and this entry does not answer it in either direction.

The second is stranger, and it exists because Saskatchewan does something no jurisdiction read here has done: it publishes the mortgage wording itself. Section 187 (1) (s) of the Act empowers regulations "prescribing shortform covenants for mortgages and the manner of identifying those shortform covenants in a mortgage", and Appendix 2 to the Land Titles Regulations, 2001, headed "Shortform Covenants in Mortgages", prints six of them in full. This is the state's own standard-form mortgage language, available to any mortgagee who wants to incorporate a covenant by naming it instead of setting it out.

Two of the six assume interest in their trigger. Covenant 3, which gives the mortgagee quiet possession on default, is triggered by default in payment of the sum of money in the "above covenant mentioned or the interest thereof or any part" of it. Covenant 5, the further-assurance covenant, is triggered by default in payment of the sum of money in "the said covenant mentioned or the interest thereof or any" part of such money or interest. The default trigger in the province's own published mortgage wording contemplates a principal and an interest running on it. A financier whose contract creates no interest and who adopts these shortforms is adopting a default clause that refers to something its own contract does not produce. The regulations say the same thing again from the other side. Regulation section 111.1 (2): "A set of shortform mortgage covenants filed pursuant to subsection (1) must not contain" - and then a list of the deal-specific items that belong in the individual mortgage rather than in a standard form. Paragraph (e) of that list is "the rate of interest of the mortgage", named as an ordinary attribute a mortgage has.

One more line from the same Appendix is worth putting next to the trust point made earlier. Covenant 1 has the mortgagor swear to hold the land "without any manner of trusts, reservations, limitations, provisos or conditions", except those in the original Crown grant. A structure in which beneficial and registered ownership are deliberately split is a structure whose parties should read that covenant before adopting it. Whether that is an obstacle, and to what, depends on the instrument and on advice, neither of which is this Act's business or this entry's.

On religion the result is the emptiest in the corpus, and it takes an odd form. There is exactly one religious word in the entire Land Titles Act, 2000, and zero across all four regulations. That one word is not in an operative provision at all: it is the name of another statute, The Religious Societies Land Act, appearing in the table of contents as the heading of a division of consequential amendments. And the text of that division is not in the consolidation. The Act says so itself, in place of sections 206 to 564: "206 to 564 Dispensed. These sections make consequential amendments to other" Acts. So the single religious word in Saskatchewan's land titles statute points at text the official consolidation does not carry. British Columbia and Quebec remain the only jurisdictions read anywhere here with a religious category in the operative law, and both spend it on the congregation's land rather than the believer's home.

Put together, Saskatchewan's answer to the corpus question is this. It charges for the extra registration a riba-free purchase requires; it will not let that registration be valued at a token amount or discounted for the buyer's beneficial interest; it has written no relief and no counting rule for the situation; it keeps the price outside the statute book, in a ministerial order; and the only route to relief it provides is a discretion in the Registrar with no stated condition attached. Alongside that, its definition of a mortgage is the most accommodating read anywhere in this corpus, and its own published mortgage wording is the least. That combination is not a contradiction. It is what a statute looks like when nobody has yet asked it this question.

What this entry does not say. It does not state what any registration costs in Saskatchewan: the ministerial order that sets the fees, charges and taxes under section 118 was not read, and no figure is estimated in its place. It does not say that a riba-free purchase is or is not charged twice in practice, because that depends on the order and on the Registrar. It does not say that the Registrar would, or would not, waive anything under section 118 (4). It does not say that any riba-free obligation is a "sum of money other than a debt or loan" within section 2 (cc), or that any is not. It does not claim the four regulations read here are the complete set as a matter of law - only that they are the four the King's Printer's own free-law catalogue groups under this Act, and the Act prints no list of its own to check that against. It makes no claim, in either direction, about any Canadian province that has not been read. And it says nothing about who may lawfully carry on business as a mortgage lender in Saskatchewan, which is not what a land titles statute is for.