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Recommendations stemming from the Elliot Lake Inquiry that concluded last year are now being implemented by the province and Professional Engineers Ontario.
A year after Justice Paul R. Bélanger issued his report from the Elliot Lake Inquiry, progress is being reported on recommendations to make the engineering profession safer.
The province issued an October update, noting that a number of the final report’s 70 recommendations have been implemented or are being carried out.
To date, the province said it has established an expert panel to provide advice on how to make buildings safer; promised support for municipalities that request help in emergency situations; trained Ministry of Labour inspectors in emergency policies and procedures; and developed a best practices guide for use by future public inquiry commissions.
Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO), meanwhile, has been working to respond to the nine recommendations that require action from the engineering industry, said Gerard McDonald, registrar at the PEO, the licensing and regulating body for engineering in the province.
One set of recommendations calls for a structural adequacy report for buildings, and the PEO is now working on guidelines for structural condition assessments before putting it into regulation.
The recommendations also suggest the reports should be filled out by an engineer with a “structural engineering specialist” designation. McDonald said the PEO is still considering how to implement this, since if the organization creates a specialist designation in one area, it may call for specialist designations in other areas as well.
And it wouldn’t be as easy as identifying certain engineers to carry the designation, since different engineers can have expertise in different areas of the profession.
“It becomes very complex,” McDonald said. “There are obviously many types of buildings, different types of structures, so how do you ensure the person has all of the different requirements to fill out that particular report?”
Another recommendation suggests engineers should have to complete mandatory continuing professional education, which McDonald said the PEO was working on even before Bélanger issued his report.
The PEO proposes a tiered program that takes into account an engineer’s area of expertise, in addition to the different stages of an engineer’s career; for example, someone who is non-practising or retired will have different requirements for continuing education than someone in their prime of their career.
So, rather than a cookie-cutter approach, the program will be tailored to individual practitioners, he added.
“The (PEO) task force recommended a risk-based type of program,” McDonald said. “So it depends on the type of engineering you’re doing and what type of risk that poses to the public as to how many hours of continuing professional development you’d need.”
Continuing professional development could take many forms, McDonald said, but would include “any type of training that’s relevant to the work you do,” such as reading of technical journals, attendance at conferences, mentoring, trade shows, or taking educational courses.
“We feel that gives sufficient flexibility for the practitioner to be able to meet the requirements of the program without undue cost to our members,” said McDonald.
For those in farflung regions, where it might not always be easy to physically attend conferences, webinars and technical reading could be options as well, he added.
Practitioners would be able to keep track of the continuing education they’ve completed through an online reporting form.
The goal is not to hinder practitioners with undue costs, paperwork, or time away from their work, McDonald added.
He called Bélanger’s appeal to have the continuing education component in place by April “optimistic,” and said the PEO would take another six months to fine-tune the program and educate its membership before they vote on it, likely in 2017.
“We want to make sure we get this right, and so we feel it’s more important to get it right than to just get it done,” McDonald said.
The Elliot Lake Inquiry was launched in 2012, following the collapse of a portion of the roof of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake, which killed two people.
