NOVEMber 2008 issue
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Professional Practice & Ethics Corner
APEGGA members with professional practice or ethics questions are welcome to mail them to Ray Chopiuk, P.Eng., Director, Professional Practice, APEGGA, 1500 Scotia One, 10060 Jasper AVE NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 4A2; fax them to 780-426-1877; or e-mail them to rchopiuk@apega.ca.
Q Could you please help me how to determine stamping requirements for an Alberta project? We are about to issue a request for proposal for some engineering work (transit signals design, to be precise). The engineered system will be constructed/installed in Alberta by us, but we need to go outside for the engineering.
Does the authorizing engineer for the designs have to be registered with APEGGA if the system will be built and operated in Alberta? What if we hire a U.S.-based consultant and the stamping engineer is a PE (professional engineer) registered in the state that he/she works?
A The legislation that APEGGA administers, namely the Engineering, Geological and Geophysical Professions Act and its general regulation, applies only to engineering practiced in the province of Alberta. The act and regulations do not apply to engineering practiced outside Alberta, for example by a PE in a U.S. state. Neither do they govern construction or installation.
If you hired a U.S.-based consultant, the designs would not be prepared in Alberta and there would be no engineering practiced in Alberta. As far as the act and regulations are concerned, the design drawings are not required to be stamped by an engineer registered with APEGGA.
However, you would need to determine whether there are other Alberta regulatory requirements (acts, regulations, codes, standards, etc.) that do mandate the involvement of Alberta-registered engineers. If there are such requirements, they would usually include stamping or certification of designs or specifications by an engineer registered with APEGGA.
For example, the Alberta Building Code and the Occupational Health and Safety Code require APEGGA engineers’ stamps on certain designs and specifications. Such legislation does not fall under APEGGA’s jurisdiction and any questions concerning such requirements should be taken up with the relevant authority that administers the legislation. In this instance, one of those questions might be whether or not the legislation pertains to the design for a traffic signal, if that isn’t readily apparent.
In the absence of any Alberta regulatory requirements for the involvement of an APEGGA engineer, you would be at liberty to accept the American PE’s design and to build and install the device accordingly.
There is still nothing to prevent you, as a client, from choosing to make an APEGGA engineer’s stamp a requirement that forms part of the contract for providing the engineering design. That would necessitate the designer either to become registered with APEGGA or to find an engineer already registered with APEGGA who would be willing to review the designer’s work and stamp it, recognizing that there would be additional costs incurred by the designer.
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