Note: No Councillor or candidate for election to Council can promise to do anything for the electorate. As individuals, Councillors – including the President and other members of the Executive – have limited personal authority. Council makes its decisions as a body, and the authority to govern the profession belongs to the group. Councillors also have limited involvement in the day-to-day affairs of PEO. They do, however, have a unique opportunity to influence the direction of the profession and to provide leadership in the setting and achievement of specific goals and strategies.
If elected, I will seek to advance the following objectives as priorities for PEO:
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Preserve and strengthen PEO’s status as a self-governing professional regulator
As you can see from my published ARTICLES and MESSAGES, I am passionate about our Canadian model of self-regulating professions and their value proposition in terms of public protection and service. Unfortunately, our governments – who in their wisdom created this model years ago - seem to have forgotten why they did so and how it was intented to work. They have also lost sight of the tremendous value to our society it has brought over many years – in the case of engineering, almost ninety years. So they keep succumbing to the temptation to tinker with it without understanding it, and to create alternative regulatory schemes that are somehow supposed to coexist with it. Ironically, I find that most members of self-regulating professions are only slightly better informed on the subject than our legislators and bureaucrats, and tend to take their self-regulting professional status for granted.
This reality presents a couple of important challenges for PEO members and their leadership:
1) We need to constantly remind ourselves of our role and mandate and mission as trustees of a self-regulating profession. We need to get clarity and consensus on what constitutes success for PEO as a regulator, and stay focused on achieving that vision.
2) Similarly, we need to continually educate our elected representatives, and the public at large, of our role, mandate, mission, and value proposition. As former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant counselled us, they need to be reminded constantly of the work professional engineers are doing day-in and day-out on their behalf, and of the many ways we are protecting public safety and well-being.
3) We need to vigorously resist any incursions by any government into our professional self-regulation, and we must preserve our independence of govenment . This is the only way we can maintain their [the government's and public's] confidence and respect. For a recent example of an unwarranted government incursion into PEO’s mandate, and my suggested response, click here. ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
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Enhance PEO’s core regulatory functions
PEO’s core regulatory functions are licensure, complaints and discipline, professional standards, and enforcement. The job of reviewing and refining our rules, processes, procedures, and systems as the profession and the regulatory environment evolves is never-ending.
For the past five years, I have been engaged in a fundamental review of our licensing criteria, processes, and legislation as Chair of PEO’s Licensing Procedures Task Force. But there is still much work yet to be done to take our licensing processes to the next level of competence assurance. I hope to continue to provide leadership in this area.
PEO recently embarked on a review of its complaints and discipline processes. Councillors will need to familiarize themselves with the relevant legislation and procedures as they consider how these can be enhanced in terms of fairness and consistency of outcome.
In my opinion, the core regulatory function requiring the most work is that of practice guidelines and standards. Council needs to ensure that sufficient staff and volunteer resources are available to deal with the backlog of standards required.
Recent changes to the Professional Engineers Act (Bill 68) present additional opportunities for enforcement. This will require beefing up of PEO’s information and industry liaison programs.
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Continue PEO’s government relations and public policy initiatives
Sitting through the Council debate on the future of the Ontario Centre for Engineering and Public Policy (OCEPP) in September, 2010 I was struck by the realization that most Councillors had forgotten (or never understood) why they created the Centre in the first place, just over a year ago. Of course this lack of clarity concerning the role of the Centre make it difficult to measure its performance against objectives. The Centre must receive strong support and direction from Council in the coming years if it is to realize its intended potential as an influencer of public policy in Ontario.
I remain firmly committed to PEO’s Government Liaison and Public Policy programs. These activities are both entirely compatible with PEO’s regulatory mandate, and absolutely necessary for PEO to have the influence in public affairs that it deserves. Advocacy on behalf of the engineering profession, as opposed to on behalf of members of the profession, is PEO’s business, not OSPE’s. To abandon our government relations and public policy initiatives is to ensure PEO’s ultimate irrelevance in the eye of both goverment and the public at large. For a more complete discussion of the objectives of these programs and why they are necessary, click here. Why Should Professional Engineers Be Involved in Public Policy
That said, I believe that both of these programs must be under the oversight of standing committees / boards made up of volunteers, and accountable to the membership through Council.
I also believe that the public policy program should be refocused on providing alternative policy proposals on matters where the profession believes government is not “getting it right” or not “getting it done”.
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Enhance volunteer management
Not to detract from the contribution of PEO’s capable and dedicated staff, but PEO is fundamentally a volunteer organization. Its real strength comes from the tens of thousands of person-hours contributed freely each year by volunteer members of Council, Committees, Task Forces, and Chapters. We need to find ways to engage more of PEO’s licensees, interns, and student members in the governance and work of their self-regulating profession, and we need to find ways to enhance their effectiveness as volunteers and their volunteer experience.
Lack of turnover and succession planning continue to plague PEO’s standing committees. I believe it is time to implement a comprehensive formal program of volunteer management designed to ensure that our committees and task forces are constantly renewed with trained, capable volunteers and that our volunteer experience is positive and rewarding.
See my ARTICLE on Leadership Sucession for some suggestions in this regard.
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Enhance governance
As a result of recent attempts by Council to change the method of electing PEO’s President and Vice President(s) that has been in place since PEO’s founding in 1922, we are now faced with a governance crisis. I believe the root cause of this crisis lies in a broken nomination process and the limited ability of our electorate (PEO members at large) to interact with and to influence their chosen leaders, both during and after the elections.
In this regard, PEO may be seen as a microcosm of public politics – where voters periodically elect representatives to govern them, who then proceed to do so without recourse to the electorate, except to try to maintain positive results in public opinion polls with a view to their re-election the next time around. In public politics, significant disconnects still occur between governments and the people, notwithstanding the information role of public media, and the many opportunitites that typically exist within election campaigns for the electorate to get to know and understand the candidates.
It seems to me that we in the self-regulating engineering profession ought to be able to do a better job than public politics of avoiding disconnects and keeping our membership and our leadership “in sync”. But in reality, PEO’s election process provides far less information to members about candidates and their positions than public election processes, and virtually no opportunity to hear them debate issues and to interact with them during the campaign period. Moreover, the effort to secure capable, electable candidates is minimal, and inconsistent from year to year. (It appears that the Central Election and Search Commmittee completely abdicated its responsibilities in this current election.)
Rather than change how we elect our President and Vice President(s), let’s work on improving how we identify candidates for nomination, and the opportunities thay have to present themselves to the membership.
Some specific suggestions:
1) Appoint a respected, independent volunteer Chief Elections Officer. No PEO staff member should be placed in this position of potential conflict.
2) Make the Election and Search committees year-round standing committees, and populate them with members who know PEO’s volunteer base and who are committed to leadership succession, instead of with PEO’s senior elected officers.
3) Arrange and facilitate all-candidates meetings, and make them accessible to all PEO members via webcast and on PEO’s website.