Lets start off then.
Canada is not a more expensive place than the US. I have traveled through a lot of the US and have several friends and work acquaintances there. I also have several older relatives who spend winters in various parts of the southwest US.
According to the hamburger index
Canadian purchasing power is about 21% above the US equivalent. Our dollar is worth around $0.75 US. Most goods in our stores are about the same number of dollars as they are in the US so they are in fact cheaper than in the US. Currently our dollar is rising compared to the US dollar so this difference is narrowing.
One major area that supports this is prescription drugs. There are several multi million dollar companies that exist solely to provide low cost drugs from the Canadian market to the US market.
We do have slightly higher taxes than the US on similar incomes and spending habits. However out tax bills include free health care for ALL Canadians. Nobody is denied health care in this country.
As far as being a P.Eng in Canada you have two options. The first and most common is to graduate from an accredited university, work for four years under other P.Eng’s and then become accepted to the profession. During the internship there is some mandatory professional development activities that have to occur as well as the requirement for at least three references. (The second method involves a series of 21(?) exams instead of the accredited degree and additional experience. I only know one person who got his P.Eng this way.)
The theory in Canada is that the scope of the profession is simply too broad to use exams as some sort of proxy for professional competence. In the US a lot of areas of the profession are not adequately covered by the exams. In the electrical field I have heard that the exams are geared towards power generation and transmission and virtually ignore the areas of low voltage and controls.
Also in Canada the term ‘collage’ usually refers to community collages. These are basically trade schools where one can take training to become carpenters, cooks, clerical etc. They also include engineering technologists. These are individuals trained in providing support services to engineers like drafting, survey, inspections etc. They are not allowed to practice engineering in any way shape or form. Never have and never will. If a technologist wants to be a P.Eng they can take the necessary courses (some universities have accelerated programs for technologists) and then get a degree and become engineering interns and eventually P.Eng’s.
The Canadian system relies instead on ones performance over 4 years of undergraduate experience and then four years of development under other engineers.
The US system relies far too heavily on your performance on two exams as a proxy for professional competence. If you are a good exam taker than you can be an engineer. The sample questions that I have seen are of the nature of how much water will flow in this pipe. The real world professional problem is to determine how much water you require to be transported, to generate options in how to transport it and finally with due regard for economic reliability and other factors pick a type of pipe, size of that pipe, length of pipe, grade of pipe etc to solve the problem.
I guess we will never agree on the validity of the industrial exemption. What I do see is that it allows for anyone regardless of competency, training and experience to call themselves engineers. All they need is someone to hire them. They can start their own company and be the head design engineer and start manufacturing products. There is no protection for the public except whatever liability insurance they have. If they have no insurance and no assets there is no public protection.
We may not have much more protection by virtue of requiring all engineers to be licensed, it does however provide something more than nothing.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
