In Canada, to work as an engineer, the only person you have to convince you are an engineer is either your boss or you boss's proxy (i.e. recruiting agency or human resources staff). As long as there's a P.Eng. signatory on staff and the company has a certificate of authorization, the boss can hire a truck driver with a grade 8 education and give them engineering work to do if that suits them. The P.Eng. signatory to the C of A is stuck with the tough job of signing/sealing the work of the other employees in the engineering department, or not doing so and being willing to lose their job for not doing so. Having the C of A and P.Eng. signatory on staff is a NECESSARY thing for public protection- a minimally necessary thing in my opinion. In the US, except for a few narrow applications where an engineering license is truly necessary, this is left almost exclusively to the insurance industry to compensate the victims afterward rather than attempting to protect the public up front. Compensating the victims is NOT public protection, so that approach is wrong headed as well as unbelievably expensive in my view.
If you intend the public (ie. companies or persons other than your direct employer) to be your customer, THEN you need a P.Eng. LICENSE to practice, as well as a certificate of authorization to practice (in most provinces). There are additional requirements including insurance etc. A prerecquisite of such a license is a degree equivalent to one obtained in Canada from an accredited program at an accredited university OR examinations proving knowledge and abilities equivalent to what that education would offer. A chemist would probably have to write about 7 of the ten exams and could challenge the other three.
The question is really this one: can you convince your prospective boss, frequently a non-engineer, that you as an industrial chemist are qualified to work as a chemical engineer? Upon what basis would such a boss make that decision- a few years of previous experience out of country that you claim on your resume, for which references would be difficult to check? How is such a boss qualified to make that judgment anyway? And what possible benefit would there be to the company of hiring such a person if people who actually have B.A.Sc. degrees in chemical engineering AND a P.Eng. license are also available to fill the position? The reality is, the boss uses the third-party certification/license AND the degree to help them judge the qualifications of a person, and that tendency will exclude people with different degrees from consideration the lion's share of the time. You won't even get your foot in the door- you might not even get a FOAD letter. (For those unfamiliar with the acronym, the last two letters stand for "...and die".
I know the value of a good chemist. I happen to work with a chemist who does industrial controls programming for a living. I also work with non-licensed engineers and non-engineers who do work similar to mine. It is possible, though difficult, for a natively educated chemist to find work more properly suiting a chemical engineer, generally by moving up the ranks in a larger organization- or founding one themselves. But it would be very difficult for an industrial chemist from outside Canada to find work as a chemical engineer here. It's a free country and you are of course welcome to try, if you meet the immigration criteria- and good luck to you. If you are willing to move to Northern Alberta and take anything you can find for the first bit, you may just end up with exactly what you want over time. Just don't come crying to the Canadian public if you end up working as a chemical technician in some lab somewhere, or worse still working in a factory or driving a taxi because the marketplace has no use for you. There is no desperate shortage of engineers in Canada, even now in a booming marketplace.
