june 2009 issue
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EWB SERIES
Beyond Public Safety
APEGGA professionalism is about keeping the public safe — and also about serving the public interest. Do members give the public interest part a high enough priority?
BY JEREMY BARRETTO, E.I.T.
EWB Member
Editor’s Note: The following article is a further instalment in our series from Engineers Without Borders.
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TRAINING TIME |
Dating from 100 B.C., the famed Ifugao Rice Terraces are simply magnificent. These were the backdrop for my overseas placement in 2004. Through Engineers Without Borders, I had the privilege of working in the remote Ifugao province of the Philippines, where the picturesque landscape stood in stark contrast to the significant challenges faced by local youth.
Rice farming, the livelihood of Ifugaos for centuries, was in decline. This put many local youth among the 12 million Filipinos without schooling or employment.
The Filipino Department of Social Welfare and Development responded by partnering with EWB to implement a country-spanning network of computer training centres. The purpose was to provide underprivileged youth with the basic computer and life skills necessary for finding employment.
Local Filipino staff led the development of the centre in Ifugao. Most of my role involved getting computer trainers up to speed and putting the computer centre into service.
The day of the centre’s launch was filled with joy. Students and government officials travelled from across the province. Fried bananas and sugary drinks were served.
But nearly double our capacity of students arrived for training that day, some after taking a six-hour bus trip. After further investigation I discovered the Provincial Governor’s Office had invited a group of youth who weren’t from the centre’s screening and registration process.
Dealing with this issue was “not the responsibility of the engineer,” I was told. However, it seemed materially unfair to me that the interests of underprivileged youth might not be served. Did my responsibility to serve the broader public interest go beyond my specific responsibilities to the project?
Bringing It Home
After returning to Canada a few months later, I was reminded that serving the public interest is in fact a central tenet of the engineering profession. In fact an overview on the APEGGA website says that “the public’s safety and well-being remain the paramount responsibility of APEGGA. Technical competence, ethical conduct, integrity and the ability to place the benefits to society above personal considerations are the hallmarks of professionalism.”
This statement makes clear that public safety is a cornerstone of our profession. Furthermore, the Engineering, Geological and Geophysical Professions Act empowers APEGGA to create a Code of Ethics that ensures the “protection of the public interest.” When the Alberta Legislature bestowed the privilege of self-regulation upon APEGGA, it intended our members to act in the public interest. That is perfectly clear.
Yet it seems to me that members better understand public safety than they do public interest. To figure out why this is so, it’s helpful to look to our history.
APEGGA was founded in 1920, only four years after the second Quebec bridge collapse resulted in the tragic and preventable deaths of construction workers. In the decades since, APEGGA has created regulations to protect the public and prevent incidents like the Quebec disasters from happening again.
Complex Challenges
But times have changed, and today threats to our safety and well-being are, arguably, more complex and diversified than could have been imagined almost 90 years ago.
Today we face new challenges at home and abroad. In 2006 the Bow River was at its lowest recorded level in 91 years. Calgary’s homeless population soared from 447 to 4,060 between 1992 and 2008. Some 800 million people across the globe go hungry each day and about one billion lack access to clean water.
Professionalism needs to keep building on its service to the public interest to respond to the environmental and poverty challenges of our time. In doing so APEGGA members are building on our proud history of protecting public safety and demonstrating our continued leadership.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single definition of what it means to serve the public interest. But at its essence, serving the public interest is about ensuring society’s common well-being or general welfare. What does serving the public interest look like on a day-to-day basis for APEGGA members?
For one, it looks like APEGGA member Don Thurston, P.Eng. Mr. Thurston has applied his knowledge of corporate governance, finance and international work from the oil-and-gas sector by taking on the role of chair of the EWB Canada Board of Directors. He also assisted Momentum, a community economic development organization, in establishing a Rent Bank to protect vulnerable members of the Calgary community from losing their housing.
Why is pubic interest work a necessary element of professionalism? In his landmark 1964 paper Harold L. Wilensky, professor emeritus of poli-tical science at the University of California Berkeley, commented on what he called “the professionalization of everyone.” Dr. Wilensky contemplated the differences between occupations such as doctors and carpenters or lawyers and autoworkers.
He found that professionals tend to have technical-based, systematic knowledge through prescribed training and adherence to a set of professional norms. Therefore, since serving the public interest is already a norm of our profession, we are obliged to integrate it into our careers.
A look to the legal profession illustrates the risks and rewards related to serving the public interest. A central challenge of the legal profession is providing access to justice, which is in part providing affordable access legal services for the public.
Janet Leiper, professor of public interest law at Osgoode Hall Law School and former Legal Aid Ontario chair, reviewed public interest literature, finding that until the 1950s the legal professions’ zealous defence of the economic, political and social status quo led to a lack of access for segments of the population.
Ms. Leiper is developing a program requiring Osgoode law students to complete a minimum of 40 hours of public-interest work prior to graduation. She says students are begging to view public-interest work as a “component of what it means to be a lawyer” and not simply charity or volunteering. The legal profession suggests that we may enrich the engineering profession by serving the public interest and risk excluding large segments of the public from our services if we do not.
The Ifugao Solution
Back at my computer centre in Ifugao, serving the interests of underprivileged youth had a surprisingly technical solution. Instead of arguing about which youth were most deserving of the training, I informed the staff that computer accounts were set up in advance for the underprivileged candidates we had pre-selected. The other youth were invited to apply for the next training to allow us time to confirm they qualify for the program.
As APEGGA members we should all engage in the public interest area of professionalism. We can each take small steps to ensure our proud history of protecting public safety is accented by a bright future improving our service to the public interest.
EWB EVENT
June 17 – EWB Annual General Meeting
MORE INFO
calgary@ewb.ca
http://calgary.ewb.ca
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