I have been serving PEO for over 15 years, elected as East Central Councillor, York Chapter Treasurer, candidate for PEO President in 2006, and Vice Chair of Disciple Committee, I’ve been following Council over the years and served as an adjudicator on several discipline hearings for PEO and the Certified Management Accountants (CMA). Over the years I have been helping and mentoring professional engineers and EITs in developing their careers. I have helped them understand the benefits we have from being a regulated profession and the need for PEO in an advance society like ours. Many have volunteered in our Chapters.
We need to be more motivated in helping our new graduates understand PEO and be proud members like when we obtained the Iron Ring.
Currently, there are a lot of great things happening with PEO, but there is a lot more room for improvement.
How do you see the future of PEO? Do you think it is linked with your future?
We the members need to support PEO now, more than before, to maintain control of our profession. In protecting the public we must protect our profession first.
Voting is all about affecting change. The elections process is designed to affect change on a regular basis by changing a team to be more progressive. Progress can only be achieved by improving our team each time. It will stagnate and even weaken if the same people keep trying for three (3) years at a time without much success. It would be beneficial to our association we encourage and motivate influential members join in and contribute to the process; that is, more members should vote, and more importantly, more members should see the need to vote. I call out to those members to voice their opinions and vote to get your representation in Council now.
With that said, if elected as president of PEO, my contributions would be all for making PEO greater by protecting our profession as we protect the public.
As engineers, we provide solutions to sustain and improve, and invent to move society forward, but we also have the responsibility and accountability for protecting the public. Our job is demanding and important, and it requires exceptional knowledge, experience and skill. Having the P.Eng. designation is an honour and affirms that one is qualified to practice in his profession and is a soldier in protecting the public.
Albert Einstein said if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. This is one of the problems with understanding how to protect the public; PEO does an excellent costly job in crucifying the engineers who have been the victims of economic complaints under the guise of protecting the public but the real underlying problem is with the economic system causing these outcomes.
We must cost effectively protect the public by focusing on the cause while at the same time protecting our engineers from falling prey to these circumstances. We have hundreds of lessons learnt which can be used to develop prescribed services and fees to eliminate these recurring problems.
The public may regard our profession in high esteem, but most may not know what engineers do. PEO’s current infrastructure directs communications about the association and its engineering community to members. Raising awareness to inform the public and government bodies of the importance of the engineering and the value that should be associated with our profession is an important first step in maximizing the financial value of the P.Eng. licence. Starting with just a few prescribed services with fees made available to the public would raise our public profile and our engineers as well.
For physicians, the quality of care is regulated so that all will get the care needed to protect the public. This quality of care is being dictated by the economic value of the care. Like physicians, engineers have an obligation to protect the public by ensuring that the quality of care is given to the engineering solution. The competition between engineers to perform their duty of care is eroding the quality of engineering. They are driven by economic and financial reasons versus the reason d’etre for the Professional Engineers Act and the Regulations of the PEO. Some services that should require about $10K of service are being done for $2K putting the public and the engineer at risk, many times with liabilities over 100 times the fees. We can see this from the increase in complaints, the increase in the discipline process, and the increase in the legal process attached to our profession.
I am not saying that this is caused by PEO, but that PEO can recognize it and regulate, mitigate, or eliminate it. The physicians did this by OHIP; as I understand it, all physicians charge the same for the same care, and I believe that allows them to deliver the same standard of care.
Engineers need additional rights and privileges in the workforce that would allow them to be innovative; which is the nature of our profession. We must move our regulations forward and make the profession both challenging and rewarding in order to make the profession desirable for the new generation of engineers. We need them as part of Council and Chapters. We need new and refreshing views, otherwise people and ideas tend to be recycled without progress. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “trying the same thing over and over again and expecting change is insanity”.
How do we make this happen?
Leadership is all about building a highly qualified, opinionated, and motivated team. Steve Jobs said the hardest part is putting the team together. Council is all about teamwork. I am all about Unifying Council from within and building a team that will work well together as well as with our partners, stakeholders, and government.
Vote Royan Anthony Warner, P.Eng., Consulting Engineer, FEC.