President’s Notebook

Election Time Draws Near

BY DR. GORDON WILLIAMS, P.GEOL.
APEGGA President

Elections for members of Council, Vice-President and President-Elect will soon be upon us. Voting begins March 1. As was the case last year, voting will be by electronic ballot, but members will again have the option of requesting a paper ballot.

In last year’s election, fewer than 10 per cent of our licensed members voted, about half the rate of previous elections. According to the Voting Participation Task Force, the drop in voter numbers was due to both motivational and mechanical reasons (You can read more about the report of the task force in the Council Briefs on page 6 of this edition of The PEGG.)

My concern is that, with such a low voter turnout, APEGGA’s legitimacy to represent the professions as a self-regulating organization could be called into question. Of course, if licensure was in the hands of a government board — as is the case in many other countries — licensed professionals would have no say in how and by whom they were governed.

Council has taken steps to fix many of the mechanical issues for this year’s election, but changing the motivational issues is your task.

In addition to our primary obligation to protect the public, we, as professionals, are responsible for caring for and maintaining the dignity and credibility of our professions. If we fail to uphold that responsibility, we diminish the respect that our professions command in the eyes of all those with whom we have dealings.

If our professions are not of sufficient importance to us, why should they be important to anyone else? We all need to be involved, and one aspect of involvement is to become knowledgeable about candidates and issues at election time and to exercise our right to choose.

Watch for information in The PEGG, and VOTE.

More on Licensure
In 1920 the Alberta Government saw fit to require those practicing engineering to be licensed to protect the public from the activities of unqualified and unethical individuals. About 35 years later, geologists and geophysicists in the oil and gas industry convinced the Association of Professional Engineers of Alberta, as our Association was then known, that the work they did had direct impact on public health, safety and welfare, and that they too should be licensed.

APEA and the provincial government agreed, with the result that Alberta geologists, geophysicists and engineers are now licensed by a single self-regulating professional association — APEGGA.

The Engineering, Geological and Geophysical Professions Act provides an exclusive legal right to use restricted professional titles and practice the three professions in our province. APEGGA is authorized by the EGGP Act to administer the requirements of the act, and licensure is not optional.

So, what does APEGGA do for me? I hear that question often, particularly when discussions turn to the need to be licensed or the amount of annual dues.

The short answer is that APEGGA provides me, and all those with appropriate qualifications, with the exclusive legal right to practice my profession. What more should we expect?

A similar question might be, “What does the Department of Motor Vehicles do for me?” The answer is it provides licences that allow me to drive my car on our highways.

On the oft-times related question of annual dues, APEGGA’s are set at $280 for 2009, and that’s a bargain. This becomes particularly apparent when they’re compared with the dues other professionals in Alberta pay for their licence, or what engineers and geoscientists in other provinces and territories pay.

President’s Visits
Each year, the President, President-Elect and Executive Director visit each of APEGGA’s 10 branches, sometimes for an entire day, sometimes for a luncheon or dinner meeting. These visits have several purposes. These are

• to provide an opportunity for members of each branch executive to talk one-on-one with the visitors

• for the visitors to learn of branch initiatives

• for the visitors to meet some of the permit holders and local dignitaries

• for the visitors to see some of the distinctive local engineering and geoscience projects.

For example, on our recent visit to the Medicine Hat Branch we were shown some of the research on explosives that goes on at Suffield, toured the military range and saw the engineering that goes into “tank-proofing” oil and gas wellheads and pipeline facilities on the base.

Similarly, at Lethbridge, we met with the branch executive, discussed plans for centennial celebrations of the Lethbridge Viaduct (the high-level railway bridge over the Oldman River), toured new environment and satellite facilities at the University of Lethbridge, visited a gemstone (ammolite) mine, toured a highly instrumented home under construction, and talked with many local dignitaries.

In each case, I had an opportunity to make a short presentation to 50 or 60 invited dinner guests on issues confronting the Association and how Council was addressing them.

We will be visiting the remaining branches early in the new year.

Caveat Emptor!
A couple of days ago an e-mail arrived in my APEGGA inbox from a Gmail address, offering structural engineering and drafting services for as little as $10 per hour. The price immediately got my attention as I pay twice that for someone to mow my lawn or shovel my driveway when I am out of town.

For $24 per hour, on offer were many structural engineering services, including drafting, steel detailing, modelling and design services for concrete, wooden, steel, composite, post-tensioned and water-retaining structures. Undoubtedly this came from an offshore entity, providing engineering in Alberta, apparently in clear contravention of the EGGP Act.

In cases like this, the challenge for our Compliance Department is figuring out which Albertans are using these services, and fulfilling the requirements to verify and take responsibility for work done by others. We have to give a very strong message to Alberta industries that they must be careful about what they buy and where they buy it.

Caveat emptor — buyer beware. Neither you nor the public may be getting value for your money!

Please get in touch with me at president@apega.ca if you have any comments or questions.