In medieval Europe, many professions were under the control of guilds. These had a monopoly over that profession in their particular city or state, backed up with all the legal power of the monarch. If you weren’t in the guild you couldn’t practice your craft. Except in a few ossified forms they are a thing of the past, but we have to wonder whether that particular message ever reached Western Canada.
An electoral candidate with an engineering degree who practices what any sane person would call engineering, has been ordered by a judge to cease calling himself an engineer. The heinous crime committed by the candidate, one [David Hilderman], is to not be a member of the guild Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. We get it that maybe calling a garbage truck driver a waste collection engineer may be stretching it a little, but here in the 21st century we think the Canadian professional body should be ashamed of themselves over this case. Way to encourage people into the engineering profession!
Here at Hackaday, quite a few of us writers are engineers. Stepping outside our normal third person, I, [Jenny List], am among them. My electronic engineering degree may be a little moth-eaten, but I have practiced my craft over several decades without ever being a member of the British IEE. No offence meant to the IEE, but there is very little indeed they have to offer me. If the same is true in Canada to the extent that they have to rely on legal sanctions to protect their membership lists, then we think perhaps the problem is with them rather than Canadian engineers. You have to ask, just how is an engineering graduate who’s not a guild member supposed to describe themselves? Some of us need to know, in case we ever find ourselves on holiday in Canada!
Header: Joe Gratz, CC0.
Typical rubbish from so-called British ‘engineers’ who are happy to live in a country where plumbers drive around calling themselves Sanitary Engineers. Nothing against plumbers we absolutely need them, but I’m a British graduate engineer, registered for over 55 years in Ontario and proud of the system. I’d like to see the writer subject themselves to neurosurgery by self-taught, self-described brain surgeon who was actually qualified as a trichologist.
This is all super bizarre to me.
If I need a plumber, I expect the plumber is a red seal holding tradesman. If I see a nurse, I expect that she is either licensed, or registered. If I see a doctor, I expect they have completed medical school. If I am reading a scientist’s work I expect that they have a PhD and have contributed to research(a little wiggle room here).
If I see a power engineer I expect they are certified and hold the seal to do so. If I see a combat engineer I expect that they have had all of the training and certification that the military requires them to get. When we needed to hire an engineer to come look at our collapsing foundation, I had the expectation that he was certified to sign off on any work being done.
I hold expectations that when I hire an engineer they have the education and certification to do the work. I don’t have the understanding of calculus, I don’t know any algorithms for finding the most efficient flow rates, I can’t do permutations, I can’t make sense of a scatterplot pathfinder. Even if a guy assures me he knows this stuff, I won’t know this difference, because it’s all above my scope of knowledge. I’ll take the guy who has had his competency “proven” through regulation standards 100% of the time. At least then I know there is something in place to hold him liable, and accountable, flawed as it may be.
I designed the electonics in the product that Kimbra used in this video to loop and process her voice. https://youtu.be/sd7GLvMYSHI?si=cP0xogknAG-N1S3b To do so it was necessary to go to China to work with engineers there to get the rubber overmold to give an acceptable finish to the product. According to EGBC, this product was NOT engineered in Canada and no engineers in Canada were involved in its development.