Questions and answers...

During the videotaped all-candidates meetings, members had the opportunity to post and vote for their priority questions on-line.  The moderator then selected the questions he would ask the candidates or ask questions of his own devising. 

I noticed on the last night of the meetings, that a question was posted asking about a more spontaneous form of questioning in which the candidates didn’t know what the questions were ahead of time so that they couldn’t prepare responses.  Candidates have one minute to respond to questions, which is a very short time to formulate and articulate an opinion, particularly under glaring lights in front of cameras.  I would prefer a platform where the candidates could initially respond with their prepared response, followed by a short facilitated back-and-forth debate based on the question and responses. 

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my one-minute responses to a variety of questions that you, the members posted. 

What are the lessons learned from Elliot Lake?

Immediately after the collapse, our profession was criticized and blame was placed upon us as a regulator.  In response to the collapse, we established a top-notch team of councillors that are structural engineers in addition to our three presidents.  We responded quickly and openly to requests from the enquiry.  In the end we were complemented on our well thought out contributions.  Kudos to the committee! 

What are the lessons learned?  That responding quickly and transparently is paramount.  Also, we can no longer hide behind self-regulation and our professional engineers stamp as our only qualification of expertise and quality work.  Since continuous professional development has been raised at the inquiry, we need to confront CPD and come up with a made in Ontario by engineers for engineers’ solution.  Additionally, moving forward we must act proactively to weed out and discipline engineers that are not providing services against measureable standards.   

What are your thoughts on the repeal of the industrial exception?  Should PEO continue in its efforts?
With the province officially putting the industrial exception on the shelf, I believe this is an opportunity to sit back and reflect on a new approach.  We are the only province that has an exception such as this – in the future; this may be an obstacle to the mobility of our engineers across provincial boundaries.  I believe the repeal is important, but we still have homework to do.  I have spoken to several professional engineers who are convinced that this is a cash grab by the PEO to gain more members and dollars – so one of our jobs is to reach out to convince our licencees.  Once convinced, they can help us lobby.  Why do they feel this way?  Because I don’t believe we have the evidence we need to demonstrate that the repeal would impact the number of injured workers or workplace related deaths in Ontario.  We need to continue to work with the Ministry of Labour, Unions, and other organizations to collect this important data and build a truly solid foundation to gain acceptance for the repeal. 

We also need to continue to build relationships with our friends in government and leaders in the manufacturing sector.