Government is regulating the regulator
B.C. replaces expertise with ignorance, Ralph Sultan says.
In days of yore, Dalmatians ran ahead of stagecoaches to warn of threats.
In future days, when driving in the country, it may be prudent to train these wonderful dogs to warn us of bridges ahead designed under the supervision of lawyers at West Coast Environmental Law. For that appears to be the intention of the Green-NDPs, who seem hell-bent on taking over governance of our engineering profession and handing it over to lawyers and environmental lobbyists.
Or more broadly in fact, taking over the governance of five learned professions: engineering and geoscience, forestry, applied biology, agrology and applied science technologists and technicians. These 55,000 British Columbians do everything from designing highways and heart valves, cutting blocks in forestry, protecting our soils and streams from degradation and certifying the septic tank in your backyard.
The NDP government is now threatening the jobs of these 55,000 hard-working British Columbians. Why?
Unfortunately our current Green-NDP government is persuaded these professions’ collective performance has been unsatisfactory. They have been convinced it was somehow a mistake to rely on highly-trained professionals.
They accept the conclusions of another report: that professional judgment and sense of responsibility has been impaired by conflict of interest and — quoting a panel of “experts” regarding a tailings pond collapse — “misplaced faith in design parameters and stability modelling ... and blinded by the confidence of an authority or by the assumed accuracy of prior testing.” Or in other words, the NDP believe the professionals overseeing complex projects have become too reliant on established science.
Worried? Don’t be! Mark Haddock, a lawyer with the Environmental Law Centre of the University of Victoria, was hired to write yet another report. But he arrives at the same conclusion: we cannot rely on these skilled professionals to fulfil the heavy responsibilities thrust upon them. They must therefore be closely supervised by more responsible minds such as may be found, one must presume, among the lawyers of the University of Victoria.
There is every indication that the NDP accepts such Ministry of Environment conclusions with enthusiasm and intends to create and staff an uber-regulator to govern the regulators: the five professional colleges who were themselves created for the purpose of ensuring professional competence and accountability, and the swearing of oaths upholding the public interest.
It’s not as though engineers in this province are running around without a strong regulatory framework to guide their work. The Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia recently commissioned the U.K.’s Professional Standards Authority (PSA) to audit and publicly report on the performance of the regulator. This is the same audit team that has been retained by B.C.’s government to look at the regulator of dentists.
The PSA’s conclusion: seven of the nine criteria assessed were met and action is already underway against the two outliers. Sure, there is some improvement required — but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The mind boggles. The engineering profession I have served for over half a century licenses at least 22 categories of applied science and that is just the beginning.
Our highly educated professionals are set up to be self-governing; who else knows the highly technical math and science needed to understand what is safe or dangerous, and who is competent or neglectful?
It is not hard to draw up a list of technical mistakes which have been made in the history of engineering. They will inevitably occur again from time to time. It is highly doubtful amateurs can make a difference. Nevertheless, it appears self-government will be a relic of the past under the NDP government’s prescription.
Some observers claim the United States is in decline due to persistent “dumbing down” of the American education system. Is British Columbia about to set out on a parallel course, replacing technical expertise with organized ignorance, ideology and dogma? Heaven help us.
Self-government will be a relic of the past under the NDP government’s prescription.