Licensure closing in

Ontario geologists and geophysicists may find it wise to watch the calendar this summer. At the end of August, their livelihood may depend on having a professional licence.

The Geoscientists Act, passed back in June 2000, specifies that anyone practising geoscience in Ontario must be a member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario, and practise in accordance with the Association’s terms of membership.

Yet of about 1,700 geoscientists in the province, only 350 had applied for registration at the beginning of June. The Association had approved licences for only 68.

What this means is that either there will be a flood of applications at the last minute, or a large number of Ontario geoscientists will be legally out of business in September. The consequences of the latter would be very bad for the profession.

No government had to spend a lot of political capital to get the geoscientists bill through the legislature: all the parties agreed it was a necessary and desirable law, and once it was brought to the floor, it passed in a matter of minutes. But the Association of Geoscientists of Ontario spent plenty of time and effort on bringing the politicians to that point; and the profession’s credibility with the decision-makers will rest on how well it responds to getting the regulatory framework it wanted.

This is no small matter, as future government decisions may well have an impact on what geoscientists can legitimately do. If the profession were to lose the ear of ministers and senior civil servants in the Environment Ministry — to take just one example — it might find that it was not able to work in areas of practice it had thought to be its own. This is not a question of turf warfare: it is simply the need to be at the top of the bureaucracy’s mind when regulations are being drafted.

So it is unquestionably desirable to show the government that geoscientists do support the idea of self-regulation in practice, as well as in rhetoric. A weak response to the new law would show the opposite.

Those who have simply not applied out of sloth (such as certain editorial writers) will need to turn away from that deadly sin and just get it done. The deadline is coming, and anyone needing a P.Geo. for his livelihood will find it comes too soon to ignore.

We have far more sympathy with those who see it as costly. Geoscience has not been an easy way to make a living over the past few years, and those geoscientists who rely on contract work have a legitimate objection to subsidizing their client’s respectability by paying for P.Geo. licensure that brings as much benefit to the client as it does to themselves.

But it’s still the law, and the right to practise can be turned to advantage: in short, if clients want professional service, they may have to pay professional rates, which would be good, not bad, for the contract geoscientist.

We know that during the long wait for registration, many geoscientists practising in Ontario took out registrations in other provinces.

There were some good reasons for that; one reason was the perceived need to hold a professional designation to act as a Qualified Person for securities submissions. Although the Canadian Securities Administrators accepted membership in the pre-registration Association of Geoscientists of Ontario as a substitute for an Ontario licence, the weight of a genuine professional licence couldn’t be questioned.

There were practical considerations, too, including favourable fee structures and convenient licensing arrangements such as “grandfather” clauses.

The effect, though, has been to create a body of geoscientists whose credentials entitle them to practise in a province other than the one they live in. To meet the requirements of the Geoscientists Act, they have to transfer their membership into Ontario. That inevitably seems a little absurd to someone who lives in Ontario but works on a variety of projects across the country and (conceivably) around the world. For now, there is no answer to his objection that, in order to work legally in three provinces, he would need three licences.

That makes it clear that the provincial organizations must make membership more portable than it is today. The major issue is not comparing the qualifications of a St. Mary’s graduate versus a University of Calgary graduate versus a Western graduate, or examining the competing claims of a geologist with five years experience in Timmins and a geophysicist with five years around the world. The major issue is money: everybody wants some, but the startup organizations in Ontario and Quebec probably need more, just because they are not yet at the stage where they can meet their expenses out of cash flow.

It is an unfortunate accident of history that the two largest provinces have also needed to go the route of establishing a stand-alone professional organization for geologists. A good part of the startup cost in Ontario and Quebec might have been avoided if the professional engineers’ organizations in those two provinces had taken on the responsibility of licensure. But there is no turning back the clock on that issue now.

Neither is it enough to say that if those provinces had wanted registration, they should have got on the train earlier. It’s the profession that approached the governments for licensure. Governments responded as governments usually do: on their own schedule.

Instead, the profession in Ontario needs to take charge of its own future by showing legislators it was serious about self-regulation and the right to practise. Fill out those applications now: it’s the law.