DECember 2009 issue
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Frontlines
Members Vote For Compliance With Trade Deals
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HISTORIC MEETING |
APEGGA’s governing legislation will soon comply with two trade agreements requiring full professional mobility across provincial and territorial borders in Canada. On Nov. 26, members voted overwhelmingly in favour of the amendment to the General Regulation of the Engineering, Geological and Geophysical Professions Act.
The vote came during the first-ever Special General Meeting in the nine-decade history of the organization. Of about 100 professional members attending the meeting held jointly in Calgary and Edmonton, only eight voted against a motion to approve the amendment.
“We are pleased to announce to our 56,000 members, to the government and to the public that APEGGA, as required by law, is now 100 per cent compliant with both AIT and TILMA,” said APEGGA President Jim Beckett, P.Eng.
AIT is the nationwide Agreement on Internal Trade. TILMA is a similar agreement between Alberta and B.C., and the acronym stands for the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement.
The changes do not affect the review process for new applicants, undertaken by the arms-length APEGGA Board of Examiners. They do mean, however, that a professional engineer or geoscientist of good character and reputation, licensed and in good standing in another Canadian jurisdiction, will automatically be licensed when applying in Alberta.
“I can’t emphasize enough that this applies only to applicants who are already licensed elsewhere in Canada,” said Mr. Beckett. “It does not apply to new applicants or to applicants from outside of Canada.”
For constitutional reasons, the final responsibility for issuing a licence to practice engineering or geoscience must remain with provincial or
territorial regulators such as APEGGA.
Those attending the meeting — which linked the two cities using video conferencing technology — heard that APEGGA is working with others to ensure that all Canadian engineering and geoscience regulators have the same high standards for licensure. “This doesn’t mean that every jurisdiction will do things in exactly the same way. But it does mean that we’ll have the same high standard of results in each jurisdiction,” Mr. Beckett said.
Any concerns about individuals licensed by other jurisdictions will be addressed by APEGGA’s well-established and robust investigations and discipline process.
Virtually full mobility for engineers has existed in Canada since 1999, when APEGGA and the 11 other members of Engineers Canada signed the Inter-Association Mobility Agreement. A similar agreement exists for geoscientists in Canada.
The agreements meant that professional
members licensed in one Canadian jurisdiction could become licensed in another Canadian jurisdiction with a minimum of effort. Even so, the agreements did not make transfers automatic. They allowed associations to apply due diligence and turn away applicants with deficiencies.
Under that system, 99.8 per cent of the engineers who applied to transfer between provinces and territories were essentially compliant with both AIT and TILMA. That, however, is not
acceptable under the trade agreements.
TILMA, for example, requires 100 per cent compliance. The provincial government may be subject to penalties of up to $5 million of taxpayer money, should there be a violation of the agreement by a self-regulatory organization such as APEGGA.
The amendment to the General Regulation must now be accepted by the Cabinet of the Alberta Government.