EDITORIAL — We are, we are, we are, — you’re not — Campaign a low blow to geologists

Ontario’s engineers have returned their ballots in a referendum on changes to the Engineers’ Act. The changes provide for professional registration of geologists and geophysicists. If the engineers approve the changes, the Act will prescribe minimum standards of education and experience to be met by anyone practising in the earth sciences. It will also give the professional body, Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), the power to discipline geoscientists for misbehavior or incompetence.

The surprise is that these proposals were forced to a referendum at all.

Across Canada there has been a movement to bring about professional registration, springing from a recognized need to ensure earth scientists working in mining, construction and environmental protection are doing their jobs capably and ethically. The majority of the geological fraternity was anxious to have a formally recognized code of practice, backed up by legal recognition of earth science as a self-regulating profession.

It was already possible for geologists with accredited engineering degrees to register as professional engineers. The proposed changes open the door to geologists with science degrees as well.

Registration had long been a fixture in Alberta and the Northwest Territories, where geologists and geophysicists were registered by the same professional body as the engineers. Other provinces developed registration systems on the Alberta model in the early 1990s, and legislation is awaiting passage in three others.

It looked as though Ontario would follow: the Association of Geoscientists of Ontario and the Professional Engineers Ontario had jointly placed a request for revisions to the Engineers’ Act before the government, with the approval of a strong majority of the PEO’s council. Then a group calling itself “Engineers for Engineering” stepped in.

At a PEO council meeting last Nov. 21, a motion putting the changes to a referendum of the whole membership passed by one vote. Consulting the membership on the changes is reasonable, but the group’s campaign against registration of geoscientists has turned into a circus of name-calling and falsehoods.

PEO Councillor Nicolae Volf wrote in the January issue of Engineering Dimensions that the changes would compromise the PEO’s commitment to protect the public interest, create discipline and enforcement problems, and turn the organization into “a storefront for licence.” He suggested earth scientists were “not mentally developed to provide practical solutions.” Patrick Quinn, the PEO’s vice-president, argued that “if geoscientists had university curricula acceptable to our association, they could be classed, as many are, as geotechnical engineers,” a claim also echoed by Volf.

Both opponents raise the spectre of Bre-X Minerals. “Geoscientists,” writes Volf, “have nothing to offer to the engineering profession except Bre-X.” Quinn chimes in, “To associate engineers with these types of scandals is something we should avoid.”

Too late, gentlemen: engineers are liberally plastered with the muck of Bre-X. The mining engineers at Kilborn SNC Lavalin missed abundant clues that Bre-X’s Busang deposit was a fraud; so did metallurgical engineers at the Australian consulting firm Normet.

On the other hand, geologists without engineering degrees played a large part in exposing the fraud: we can cite Freeport geologists David Potter and Steven Van Nort, and Strathcona Mineral Services geologists Henrik Thalenhorst and Reinhard von Guttenberg.

Volf and Quinn are practising professionals; by now, they should have outgrown such campus-bar taunts and badly-informed innuendo.

When a committee of Ontario geologists first approached the PEO in 1989, it was a signal from the profession that it wanted all geologists, whether their degrees were in engineering or science, to submit themselves to the discipline of the Engineers’ Act. That a minority of engineers should now be trying to block that with insults and untruths is a curious way of serving the public interest.