New Brunswick is the first jurisdiction read anywhere in this corpus whose land register already holds a place for the riba-free shape

Every jurisdiction read in this corpus is asked the same question. A riba-free purchase usually puts the financier on the register for a moment on its way to the household: the financier buys, then sells or leases or sells down to the family. Does the state charge for that extra step, and if it relieves it, what does it ask before relieving it. New Brunswick is the tenth Canadian province to answer, and with it the provincial statute book is read whole - Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and now New Brunswick. The three territories remain unread.

It has taken several rounds to get here, and the obstacle was not the law but the server. The province's official legislation host answers a machine with a bot challenge rather than a document, which is why earlier rounds recorded New Brunswick as unreachable. The instruments below were read instead from the Internet Archive's raw captures of the publisher's own pages, and the transfer tax Act was read twice, once from that captured page and once from the Queen's Printer's bilingual PDF, so that every quotation in this entry stands in two independent artefacts of the same official text rather than one. The Act as read states its own currency: "N.B. This Act is consolidated to October 1, 2020."

The charge is short and it is on the deed. Since April 2016 the Act requires that "every person who tenders a deed for registration in the Province shall pay, before the deed is registered, a tax computed at the rate of 1% of the greater of" the consideration for the transfer or the assessed value of the property. Two things in that sentence matter to a riba-free purchase before any exemption is reached. The tax attaches to the act of tendering a deed, so it counts documents, not families. And it runs on the greater of price and assessed value, so a structure whose second document carries a marked-up price cannot be charged on the lower of the two numbers.

The definitions then make the financier's document a deed. A "deed" is "any instrument whereby real property is conveyed, transferred, assigned to or vested in any person", and "real property" reaches "every estate or interest therein whether such estate or interest is legal or equitable". A financier that takes title on the way through is a person in whom real property is vested. Nothing in the charging section asks why.

Now the finding that is new to this corpus. New Brunswick DID legislate a once-only rule. Section 3 (1) reads: "Where a deed may be registered in more than one registry office, in more than one land titles office or in both, the tax is payable only once in respect of the first of such transfers tendered for registration." Read what it counts. It counts PLACES. It is a rule about one document that could be lodged in two offices, and it says the province will not charge twice for the same deed merely because the land straddles a boundary. It is not a rule about two transfers in one purchase. Ontario wrote a subsection actually headed "Tax only paid once", and it relieved the registration where tax on the beneficial disposition had already been paid - the same movement documented twice. New Brunswick relieves the same deed lodged twice. Neither reaches a riba-free purchase, in which two genuinely different transfers occur, and New Brunswick's is the narrower of the two. This is the first once-only rule read anywhere here that is keyed to geography.

Section 6 then lists fourteen exemptions, lettered (a) to (n). Four of them speak about financing, and every one of them speaks the conventional mortgage's own vocabulary. Paragraph (m) is the load-bearing one: no tax is payable on "a deed by which real property is transferred for the purpose only of securing a debt or loan, or by which a creditor transfers real property for the purpose only of reconveying real property that he had been holding as security for a debt or loan". Both legs of the secured route are relieved - the security going in and the reconveyance coming out - and the hinge in each is a debt, a loan, a creditor and the purpose of securing. A financier in a riba-free purchase holds title because it bought the house, not as security for a loan it did not make, and passes title on by selling or by completing a lease, not by reconveying security. Paragraph (i) relieves "a deed by which a mortgagee transfers real property to himself as grantee in the exercise of a power of sale", which is the mortgagee after default. Section 8 (3) names any "mortgagee, judgment creditor or other person having any claim, lien, privilege or encumbrance" and lets each of them, having paid the province's lien, "add such amount to his mortgage, judgment or other security".

That leaves the door in paragraph (n): "any other class of instruments which is exempted from the tax by regulation", matched by the regulation-making power in section 9 (f), "exempting from the tax any class of instruments". In most of the jurisdictions read in this corpus a door like that is where the negative finding stops being exhaustive and becomes merely bounded. Here it can be closed. The publisher lists exactly one regulation under this Act, New Brunswick Regulation 83-106, and it was read whole. Section 3 of that Regulation exempts ten classes of instrument, and they are a local government, a water or wastewater or regional service commission, a commission under the Local Governance Act, marital property between spouses, four shapes of corporate reorganisation resting on beneficial ownership of "at least 95% of the share capital" - and one financing party. Paragraph (d): "a deed by which real property is transferred to the guarantor of a mortgage who obtains the real property as a result of a default of any payment under the mortgage by the mortgagor". So the single time New Brunswick has ever used its power to widen the exemptions, it used it on a fourth conventional financing party, and again only after something had gone wrong. The Regulation states its own currency: "N.B. This Regulation is consolidated to January 1, 2018."

The word "interest" appears nine times in the Act. Five of them are a proprietary interest in land. The other four are all the province's own money. Section 7: "Where there is due and unpaid any amount of taxes, interest as prescribed by regulation is to be added beginning on the day the deed was registered." Section 9 (b) empowers "prescribing a rate of interest to be added to unpaid taxes", and the same Regulation 83-106 prescribes it: "the rate of interest to be added to unpaid taxes is" either "1.5% per month compounded monthly" or "19.56% per year". That is worth stating plainly, without inference about anyone's intent. New Brunswick's transfer tax never says lender, borrow, credit, financing, financial or bank - the only word in the Act with a bank's root is Bankruptcy, in the exemption for a receiving order - and the one rate of return on money it does write is the compound rate the Crown charges a purchaser who pays it late.

Two provisions treat the instalment shape with unusual care, and both cut in the purchaser's favour. Paragraph 6 (a) exempts "an agreement for sale or purchase" outright: the contract itself is not a taxed deed. And the rate provisions grandfather by the date of that contract rather than the date of registration - "Despite subsection (1.01), in respect of an agreement for sale or purchase executed before March 28, 2012, the percentage referred to in subsection (1.01) shall be read as 0.25%, regardless of the date on which the deed is tendered for registration", with the same machinery repeated at subsection (1.04) for the later rate change. British Columbia built its once-only relief on the agreement for sale; Nova Scotia put it outside the tax by definition; New Brunswick exempts it and then anchors the rate to it. A deferred-payment sale is a shape several riba-free structures use, and it is the one shape this Act treats gently. The gentleness stops at the deed that follows, which is taxed.

Then paragraph 6 (b), which exempts "a lease for a term of less than twenty-five years". Nova Scotia is the only other jurisdiction read anywhere in this corpus whose tax turns on how long a lease runs, and it drew the line at a "lease for a term of less than twenty-one years". New Brunswick draws it four years further out, and both lines fall in the same awkward place. The lease-to-own family of riba-free structures - ijara ending in ownership, and the lease leg of a diminishing partnership - is ordinarily written for the length of a home finance term. Under twenty-five years, the lease is not taxed in New Brunswick. At twenty-five years or beyond, the exemption stops. State the limit as clearly as the finding: the Act does not say in terms that a long lease is taxable. It says that a short one is exempt, and an exemption is only needed for something otherwise caught. That is a reading of the drafting, not a quotation and not a ruling, and no New Brunswick case or ministerial determination on the point was read.

What makes New Brunswick different from every other jurisdiction read here is what happens next, in the register rather than in the tax. The Land Titles Act exists "to provide a system for the registration of the title to land in the Province and instruments related thereto and to provide statutory authority for guaranteed land title". It requires that "Every lease of registered land, except a lease for a period not exceeding three years where there is actual occupation of the land under the lease, shall be evidenced by" a registered lease or a registered notice of lease. And then section 27 (7): "A right of the lessee to purchase the land or extend or renew the term of the lease may be stipulated in the lease" and in that case the words "and option" are to be added immediately following the word "lease" in the heading of the instrument. A lease under which the tenant may buy the house is a named, registrable thing in New Brunswick, with its own heading on the title register. That is the shape of a lease-to-own riba-free structure, described in a statute that never mentions Islam, Muslims or religion anywhere in its text, and whose only use of the word faith is the conveyancer's "good faith". The older deeds system has no equivalent: the word "option" does not appear once in the Registry Act.

The price list confirms it. Schedule B of the Land Titles Act's General Regulation opens "$84 fee per parcel for" and then lists the forms it applies to. Among them, in one list at one price, are Transfer, Mortgage, "Collateral mortgage 15.1", Lease, "Lease and option 19" and "Notice of lease and option 20". Registering the ownership transfer and registering the mortgage cost the same. Registering a lease with a purchase option costs the same again. An "Application for optional lease covenant 21" is in the schedule's no-fee list, beside the equivalent application for a mortgage covenant. There is an "Assurance fee - a fee of $1 per parcel" on top, and where the schedule is silent, "In all other respects, the Schedule of Fees under the Registry Act applies, as far as is applicable" - and that schedule, in Regulation 2000-42, prices registration of an instrument "for the first five parcels referred to in the instrument, per parcel" at $85.

Set that against Newfoundland and Labrador, read in the round immediately before this one, and the two Atlantic provinces sit at opposite corners. Newfoundland has no transfer tax at all, and does its damage in the fee: charged on the value of the property, expressly multiplied for each instrument in a group, capped for a mortgage and for a charge but not for a conveyance. New Brunswick does the reverse. Its fee is flat, per parcel, and identical for the transfer and for the mortgage - the first registration price read anywhere in this corpus that is genuinely indifferent between the two structures - and the whole of its discrimination lives in one tax statute, in the four paragraphs that relieve a creditor, a mortgagee, a guarantor and a reconveyance.

For a household the practical picture is therefore narrow and legible, which is itself unusual. The registration fees do not care which structure is used. The tax does, and it cares in one direction: the conventional mortgage is relieved by paragraph (m) and the household pays on its own deed, while a purchase routed through a financier that takes and passes title presents two deeds, each of them a deed within the definition, with no exemption written for either transfer and a once-only rule that counts offices rather than transfers. The one riba-free shape the Act treats generously is the agreement for sale, which is exempt outright, and the lease whose term stays under twenty-five years. No figure is offered here for what any of this costs a particular family: the tax runs on the greater of price and assessed value of a particular property, and nothing in this entry is calculated.

Limits, stated rather than buried. No New Brunswick case law was read, and no administrative guidance or ministerial ruling. The reading that a lease of twenty-five years or more is charged rests on the structure of an exemption, not on a quoted charging word or a decided case. The fee schedules are quoted as they stand in the consolidations captured - Regulation 83-106 "consolidated to January 1, 2018", Regulation 2000-42 "consolidated to November 1, 2021" - and no later fee order was searched for. Nothing was read in French, though the Act is enacted in both languages and the French column sits beside every line quoted here. And the deeds registry and the land titles system run side by side in this province, which is why the tax statute names both; which system a particular parcel sits in was not determined for any parcel, because no particular parcel is discussed.