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BY RON TENOVE, P.ENG.
APEGGA President
In recent months, news media coverage and industry's pulse
rate have been dominated by the imminent action of the Prime
Minister and federal government to support the Kyoto Protocol.
In my July President's Notebook, I encouraged APEGGA members
to get informed and involved, as any outcome will certainly
impact our work and family situations.
You have also seen articles in the PEGG on the APEGGA Advocacy
Task Force as it attempts to determine whether and to what
degree APEGGA can reasonably represent membership in having
an opinion on issues, which will impact society and membership.
The challenge is to not be self-serving but to embrace our
mandate of protection of public safety, welfare and well being.
This will be quite a balancing act considering the virtual
impossibility of obtaining the opinion of all members in a
timely manner. To date, we do not have the answer and deliberations
continue.
But our various stakeholder audiences want to know the engineering
and geosciences professions' perspective on issues where our
technology credentials are the obvious source of informed
opinion. Climate change is the current topic of national public
attention.
In 1999 APEGGA presented a position paper on Climate Change
and the role of our professions to understand the problem
and to make a contribution to environmental responsibility.
On Sept. 13 APEGGA Council requested that the president of
your Association send a letter to government leaders requesting
"no decision on support of Kyoto Protocol until Canadians
have real information on the content and impacts of ratification
and the opportunity to input to a coordinated national strategy."
Here are a few website addresses for information from federal
and provincial governments, the United Nations, the Canadian
Academy of Engineering, Alberta industry, and other groups:
www.capp.ca
www.climatechangecentral.com
www.NCCP.ca
www.iisd.org (International
Institute for Sustainable Development
www.acad-eng-gen.ca
http://unfccc.int (UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, links to the Kyoto Protocol
itself and other background).
Anticipating APEGGA members will have comments, we have created
an area on the APEGGA website to collect your responses.
View the form.....here.
View the letter sent to the Prime Minister on Sept. 23 ...
here.
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