Date Published:
February 2005

L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

Geographic Board of Canada

Geographic Board of Canada, a board constituted by order-in-council of the Canadian government on December 18, 1897, for the purpose of bringing about uniformity in the nomenclature and orthography of the geography of Canada, and especially in the practice of the map-making departments of the government. The board is composed of members of the Geological Survey, the departments of railways and canals, of marine and fisheries, of the post-office, and of the interior, as well as the surveyor-general of Dominion lands. Its work has been highly successful, and its decisions have been embodied in the annual reports, those from 1898 to 1912 having been issued as supplements to the annual reports of the department of marine and fisheries, and those from 1913 as supplements to the annual reports of the department of the interior. The eighteenth report contains all decisions to 1924; since then supplements have been issued. The board has issued also a number of special publications, such as the Handbook of the Indians of Canada (Ottawa, 1913), J. T. Walbran's British Columbia coast-names (Ottawa, 1909), and treatises on the place-names of northern Canada, Quebec, the Thousand islands, Alberta, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Anticosti, and the Magdalen islands.

Source : W. Stewart WALLACE, ed., The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. III, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 396p., p. 17.