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People’s Party candidate must stop using ‘engineer,’ B.C. Supreme Court rules
(www.winnipegfreepress.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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In Canada that term is a legal title, like Doctor. If Americans started using that term willy-nilly, I don't think we should have to adjust our legislation.
Yea this is a murky area, there are things that are clearly acts of engineering namely civil engineering projects bridges, factories, etc., that fit very well with the way the title of engineer is sanctioned province by province.
It gets murky for me with transportation things, here I still believe they should be scanctioned engineers but I don't feel the provinces are the best ones to mandate who should be a licensed engineer for something that travels at 700 kph across the country, I think that's more a national level interest.
Messing things further is in other countries there isn't a special meaning to the word engineer and it's missused in our sense of context. The title is tossed around in some places for things like sanitation engineer and software engineer, where what these folks are doing is clearly not acts of engineering but the title is given In lieu of increased pay.
Electrical engineering is smack dab in the grey area if it was work on a big power plant sure traditional act of engineering. Designing firmware for a mass produced widget may not be. But if the job is being advertised in the US they'd both be looking for an electrical engineer. And a lazy hr person here may be looking for an EE in Canada skipping over candidates that don't have the certificate from the provincial engineering body but can do the job as good or if not better.
Again this confusion is avoided if everyone knows Engineer is a very loaded word and need a to be handled with care in the confines of Canada, but we as Canadians need to understand others don't give the same care to this word.
The PPC guy is probably playing this up to get him free publicity at this point as he should be painfully aware of this from his undergraduate courses beating it into I his skull.
That said it's not a bad idea to examine the details to see if updates can be made to definitions in the provincial acts so engineers can better serve the public and we can avoid policing the use unnecessarily. I also think we should have a federal level dealing with acts of engineering that normally cross provincial boarders
Argh way to long winded owell enjoy the wall of text
Sanitation engineer is just to fancy up the title. Technician is a much better euphemism.
I'm sure if you looked into the etymology of 'sanitation engineer,' it might have seen its creation in parody of the US practice of euphemistically calling their programmers lofty titles like 'software engineer.' The idea is that you don't need to call yourself by your actual title if you're ashamed of it, you just need to call yourself a "(name of industry) engineer" and that becomes a catch-all for all position names in the industry even when it's not helpful to anyone trying to communicate the actual requirements. A Marine Engineer and a Hull Technician are two very different jobs, and a lot can get wet if I'm looking for the latter but they've hung their shingle out as the former.
It's becoming the same with designers. Actual designers get a pretty pissy when the rich housewife suddenly starts calling herself an "interior designer" because she took an online course from Home and Garden magazine. Interior decorator, please.