Newfoundland and Labrador never wrote a land transfer tax at all

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. Does the state charge for that extra step, and if it relieves it, what does it ask before relieving it. Ten 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 at all. Ontario built real anti-double-taxation machinery, headed a rule "Tax only paid once", 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. Quebec put the relief inside the definition of "transfer". Alberta keyed its relief to whether interest was payable. Saskatchewan wrote no relief and no counting rule, and kept the price outside the statute book. Manitoba left the mortgage outside the taxed event by excluding it from the definition. Prince Edward Island never let the mortgage in at all, and named the conventional mortgagee three times, every time after default. Nova Scotia taxed the same deed twice from two levels of government and turned its central exclusion on how long a lease runs.

Newfoundland and Labrador is the ninth Canadian province read here, the third and last Atlantic province, and the eleventh answer. It is also the first jurisdiction read anywhere in this corpus that answers the question by not asking it. There is no land transfer tax in this province to relieve, exempt, or count once. There is a fee. The finding of this entry is that the fee does everything a transfer tax does to a riba-free purchaser, and does it with none of the machinery that ten other legislatures built around their taxes - no exemption list, no once-only rule, no definition that lets a security transfer out, no relieving power, and no amount anywhere in the statute book.

The negative control was run first, and run on the province's own consolidated tax statute rather than on a search engine. The Revenue Administration Act, SNL2009 c R-15.01, was read whole. Its Parts impose, in the publisher's own headings, GASOLINE TAX, HEALTH AND post-secondary education tax, HORSE RACING TAX, INSURANCE COMPANIES TAX, MINING AND mineral rights tax, RETAIL SALES TAX, TOBACCO TAX and VAPOUR PRODUCT TAX. The phrases "land transfer tax", "transfer tax" and "deed transfer" appear in it zero times. Land enters the Act at exactly one place and in exactly one role: as something a tax lien fastens onto, where s 18 (3) provides that "A lien for tax in respect of real property is considered to be a first mortgage ranking in priority over every grant, deed, lease, or other conveyance and over every judgment, mortgage, or other lien or encumbrance affecting the real property affected". The province knows how to reach land. It has simply never chosen to reach a transfer of it.

The Registration of Deeds Act, 2009 is a short Act - its enacted text runs to about thirty-one thousand characters - and that shortness is what makes the counts below shown rather than asserted. It defines its central term at s 2 (a): "deed" means a written document by which a person transfers ownership of real property to another. Note what that definition does not do. It does not exclude a mortgage, as Manitoba's and Nova Scotia's do. It does not exclude an agreement of sale, as Nova Scotia's does. It does not need to, because nothing turns on it: no tax hangs off the word.

Inside that enacted text, counted by whole word and by inflected form rather than by substring, the following are absent altogether: tax, price, sale, vendor, instalment, partner, nominee, beneficial, financing, financial, bank, loan, lend and borrow, relief, religious, religion, church, charitable, Islam, Shariah and Muslim. So are "once" and "twice". The word "interest" appears eight times and every one of the eight is a proprietary interest in land or a security interest under the Personal Property Security Act - "an interest in or title to land", "notices of security interest or discharge", "an interest passes", "an interest in property", "a transfer of or an interest in land". Not one of the eight is a return on money. This Act has no vocabulary for lending at all. What it has instead is "mortgage", thirty-three times, and "mortgagee", ten.

The mortgage is handled by a device the corpus has not met before. Under s 7 (1) (e) what goes on the register is not the mortgage but a notice of it - the registrar registers "notices of pending lawsuits, notices of mortgages, notices of transfer of mortgage, notices of release of mortgage and other notices in relation to a charge or encumbrance on land". The instrument itself stays private, and s 8 gives the mortgagor a right to ask for it: where a notice of mortgage has been filed, "the mortgagor may request from the mortgagee a full copy of the mortgage document and the mortgagee shall provide that document within 30 days of receipt of the request". A conveyance, by contrast, is registered as the instrument. The financier's security can be disclosed by summary. The financier's ownership cannot.

Now the price. Section 39 (1) reads, in its entirety: "The minister may set fees to be collected by the registrar for the purpose of this Act." There is no criterion in it, no ceiling, no formula, no requirement of publication, and no direction that the fee bear any relation to the cost of registering anything. Section 39 (2) supplies the Act's only relief of any kind: "A fee is not payable on the registration of a deed or other instrument by or on behalf of the Crown." In the whole Act, the only party excused from paying is the state that sets the charge.

The bound on that power is shown rather than assumed, and it is shown twice. First, the Act's regulation-making power at s 38 was read limb by limb - all fourteen of them, (a) through (n) - and not one concerns fees. They concern electronic filing, compliance review, licensed users, categories of persons, confirmation of registration, the form of notices of mortgage, changes in technology, "the exemption of property from the requirements of subsection 34 (4)", defining an undefined term, and giving effect to the purpose of the Act. The fee power is deliberately not a regulation-making power: s 39 (1) lets the minister "set fees", not make regulations prescribing them. Second, the publisher's own Table of Regulations was captured whole and searched. It lists one thousand six hundred and sixty-three regulation titles. Exactly one of them names this Act - the Registration of Deeds Regulations, NLR 110/10 - and not one title in the entire list names both a deed and a fee. So the price of registering a deed in this province is not in the statute book and is not in the regulation book, and that is not an inference from a failed search; it is what the publisher's index says.

The price is in a PDF on a departmental website. Its heading is "Schedule of Fees Prescribed by the Minister of Government Services" over the words "Registry of Deeds", and its first clause reads "This Schedule may be cited as The Registration of Deeds Prescribed Fees." Its second begins "The Registrar shall collect and pay into the Consolidated Revenue Fund the following fees". It is the executive's own price list, published as a form rather than as law, and it is the only document read anywhere in this corpus that states what a riba-free purchaser would actually be charged for the extra step.

Two things about that document are recorded here as text, with no inference drawn from either. It closes: "DATED at St. John's in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, this 1st day of May, 2007." The Act it is now collected under was assented to on 28 May 2009, two years later. And clause 2 (1) (j) prices "a certificate of search under section 35" - but in the Registration of Deeds Act, 2009 section 35 is headed "Interest not affected" and concerns the Personal Property Security Act, while searches are section 30. The schedule's internal cross-reference does not match the Act in force. This entry states both facts and infers nothing about the schedule's currency, its validity, or how the Registrar applies it; that would require reading material this run did not read.

The sharpest finding in this entry is a matter of which nouns a sentence contains. The schedule prices a conveyance ad valorem: for registering a conveyance, assignment or other document "when the actual value of the property passing or affected by the document exceeds five hundred dollars", the fee is one hundred dollars "plus forty cents for each additional one hundred dollars or part of one hundred dollars". It prices a mortgage on the debt instead: for registering a mortgage the same rate runs on "the amount secured". Then clause 2 (2) caps one of them and not the other. It reads: "A person is not liable to pay for the registration of a mortgage, charge, floating charge, or specific or floating mortgage or charge of chattels referred to in subsection (1) a fee of more than five thousand dollars." Every noun in that list is a security interest. A conveyance is not among them. On the face of the words, the cost of registering an interest-bearing mortgage in this province is capped at five thousand dollars, and the cost of registering the transfer of ownership that a riba-free structure requires is not capped at all.

The mortgage is favoured a second time, in a clause with no counterpart for the conveyance. Where "the amount secured thereby exceeds the value of the property passing by way of security", clause 2 (1) (b) (iii) charges on the first five hundred dollars of the value of the property "plus forty cents for each additional one hundred dollars or part of one hundred dollars of that value instead of upon the amount secured". An over-secured lender is moved off the debt and onto the property. Nobody is ever moved off the property.

And where ten other jurisdictions wrote, or conspicuously failed to write, a rule that the charge falls once, this one wrote the opposite rule expressly. The words "once" and "twice" appear zero times in the Act, zero times in the regulation and zero times in the fee schedule. What appears instead is regulation s 5 (3): "Each instrument or notice of instrument in a group is considered separate and a fee is payable for each instrument or notice of instrument." That is the first express per-instrument multiplication rule read anywhere in this corpus. Ontario headed its rule "Tax only paid once". Newfoundland and Labrador heads nothing, and says each one is separate. A sequence of transfers is a sequence of fees, each charged on the value of the property, and the clause that would cap them names mortgages and charges.

The only financier named anywhere in these instruments is named in order to be given a login. Regulation s 7 (1) lists the categories of person the registrar may approve for electronic submission, and limb (c) is "a chartered bank, trust company, credit union or other recognized financial institution". That is the whole of it. Prince Edward Island named the conventional mortgagee three times and every time to relieve it; Nova Scotia named a Crown farm lender once and a foreclosing mortgagee twice. Newfoundland and Labrador names the banks once, to let them file their own paperwork. No financing party is relieved of anything, anywhere, in the Act, the regulation or the schedule.

Two parties are relieved, and only two. The Crown, under Act s 39 (2) and again under schedule clause 2 (4). And, under clause 2 (5), "a non-profit airport authority, with respect to property transferred to it under the National Airport Policy". Across a whole priced register, the legislature exempted itself and the executive exempted an airport.

The value the fee runs on is, for an ordinary purchase, simply stated rather than sworn. Section 34 requires an affidavit of value - "proof made on oath of the value of the property to which the instrument relates" - in three cases only: "(a) for a deed of gift; (b) for a deed of confirmation where no prior registrations in relation to that transfer have been filed; and (c) where the registrar considers it advisable." The state demands sworn value where there is no price, and where the registrar is unsatisfied it may require "a copy of the municipal property assessment or a report of a qualified appraiser". Limb (c) is an unconditioned discretion, and it is the point at which a transfer between a financier and a household, at a price that is not an arm's-length market price, would meet a human decision rather than a rule. Whether it does is not something this entry can answer from the text.

None of this can be avoided by leaving the financier's ownership off the register. Section 37 provides that an unregistered, unproved instrument "shall be judged fraudulent and void both at law and in equity, as against a subsequent purchaser or mortgagee for valuable consideration who first registers the instrument or notice of instrument". This is a race, not a title system: the province operates a deeds registry, not a Torrens register of guaranteed title, so priority is bought by registering first. A structure that puts a financier on title and declines to register is not saving a fee; it is standing behind whoever registers next.

Religion is absent from all three instruments. Islam, Shariah and Muslim appear zero times, and so do religious, religion, church and charitable. Unlike British Columbia and Quebec, which spent a religious category on a congregation's land, and unlike Manitoba, which imported one by cross-reference, this province wrote no religious category at all - not for the believer, and not for the congregation.

What this entry does not claim. No Newfoundland and Labrador court decision was read, and none is cited. Nothing here characterises any particular financing arrangement, predicts how the Registrar would treat one, or states what any household would in fact pay - the schedule's rate runs on the value of a particular property, and no property is before us. No figure in this entry is calculated; every numeral is quoted verbatim from the Act, the regulation, the schedule or the publisher's index. The claim that the province levies no land transfer tax is bounded by what was read: the Revenue Administration Act whole, and the Registration of Deeds Act whole, in which the word "tax" does not appear.

The pattern the corpus has been tracking now has a limit case. Ten jurisdictions taxed the transfer, and the interesting question was always what their exemption machinery asked before it let a riba-free structure through - a debt, a creditor, a named bank, the absence of interest, a change in beneficial ownership. This one built no machinery, because it levied no tax. And the result for the household that will not borrow at interest is worse, not better: it is charged on the value of the house, told expressly that each instrument is separate, offered no once-only rule to argue about, given no exemption list to fall outside of, and left facing a cap that was written for the mortgage it is trying not to take. The absence of a tax is not the absence of a price. Here it is the absence of every protection a tax had accumulated.