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Article Excerpt
Introduction
In Canada, foreign-trained immigrant professionals often have difficulty securing the appropriate licenses required to practice in their profession of training. This obstacle has significant implications for the labour market integration of immigrants, forcing many individuals into low-wage and unstable 'survival' jobs (McDade 1988; Brouwer 1999; Mata 1999; MTCU 2002; Bauder 2006). In an interview with the New York Times, Canada's then federal Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Joe Volpe, described the professional regulation system as 'an arcane infrastructure ... that essentially mitigate[s] against the immediate integration of highly skilled immigrants' (Krauss 2005).
This article discusses the historical development of the institutions that regulate the engineering profession in Ontario and the other provinces of Canada. While political agitation in favour of the professionalization of engineering occurred at a national scale, professions are regulated at the provincial level in Canada's federal system. In this essay, we analyze the motives for professional regulation expressed at a national level, but concentrate on the passage of regulatory legislation in the province of Ontario. The discussion focuses on the period between the early 1900s, when arguments in favour of engineering professionalization intensified, and the late-1930s, by which point the profession was statutorily closed in most provincial jurisdictions, including Ontario. This period contains pivotal episodes in the development of professional engineering regulation in Canada. In the article, we analyse several engineering professional periodicals dating from the study period to understand the motivations behind the institutions and practices of professional licensing in Canada, which continue to disadvantage immigrant professionals today (see Boyd and Thomas 2002; Geddie 2002).
Our results indicate that perceived labour market competition from foreign engineers was directly linked to calls for exclusive legislation closing the profession. Geography performed an important role in the efforts of engineering societies to overcome the competitive threat posed by non-Canadian practitioners. Specifically, Canadian engineering societies argued that practicing engineering in Canada's geographical space and its physical environment involved unique challenges. Consequently, the competence of engineers from abroad was questioned due to their supposed lack of awareness and understanding of the environmental intricacies of practicing engineering in Canada. Because incompetent engineers produce unsafe and ineffective work, Canadian engineering societies justified their demands for closure on the basis of protecting the Canadian public from unqualified foreign practitioners.
Millard (1988) is one of the few sources discussing the political context in Canada in which legislation closing the engineering profession was passed. This article and Millard's work draw on a number of the same engineering periodical sources. However, to conduct our analysis we interpret these data using a framework based on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu to understand how Canadian engineering society members used cultural and environmental criteria in an attempt to distinguish themselves from non-Canadian labour market competitors.
In the following section, we provide a brief history, of professional engineering organization in Canada leading up to the 1930s, and review the closing of the profession by provincial legislation. In the next section, we develop a conceptual framework of the cultural regulation of the engineering labour market. This framework draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of institutional cultural capital, which we expand to include the notion of habitat. Following a discussion of our method, we examine the different arguments presented in the professional debate leading up to closure and interpret their validity in relation to our conceptual framework.
A Brief History of Engineering Regulation in Canada
Confederation represents an important event in the history of professional societies in Canada. The British North America Act of 1867 gave provincial governments legislative responsibility for education (Department of Justice n.d., section 93). At this time, professional associations were considered educational bodies due to their origin as learned societies. As a result, the associations of professional engineers that were established after Confederation have been under provincial jurisdiction ever thereafter (Hamilton 2001).
Engineering special interest groups and technical societies were formally established in Great Britain in 1825 (the Institution of Civil Engineers) and the U.S. in 1869 (the American Society of Civil Engineers) (Hart 2001). In Canada, the first engineering educational institutions were founded in the mid-nineteenth century (Morris 1990). (1) These developments within and outside of Canada motivated a number of Canadian engineers to begin promoting the establishment of a national engineering interest group (Hart 2001). As a result, the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers (CSCE)2 was organized in Montreal and obtained its charter as a learned professional society in June of 1887 (Hart 1997). The CSCE immediately began to grow and by the outbreak of World War I consisted of eight chapters across the country with a total of over 3,000 members (EIC 1927). Over time, the engineering profession developed into a number of separate disciplines. With the intention of remaining a representative body of the engineering profession as a whole, the CSCE changed its name in 1918 to the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) to include mechanical and electrical engineers in addition to civil engineers, who represented by far the largest cohort of engineers at the time (Hart 2001).
After World War I, a post-war recession led to widespread unemployment that was exacerbated by the swift demobilization of many soldiers and servicemen (Knowles 2000). In addition, many large civil engineering projects--such as canals and the transcontinental railways--were completed prior to the war which reduced demand for civil engineers. During this period of declining demand, Canadian universities expanded their programs and graduated increasing numbers of engineers, many of them returned soldiers (Millard 1988; Morris 1990). In addition to these changing labour market conditions, high immigration levels before and after World War I brought many engineers to Canada, which contributed to uneasiness among Canadian engineers about competition from abroad.
Between 1910 and 1914, over 1.5 million immigrants arrived in Canada, the highest intake of migrants of any 5-year period in the country's history (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2003). Although immigration levels dropped dramatically during World War I, the number of immigrant arrivals increased during the years immediately after the war. Immigration rose from 41,845 in 1918 to 107,698 in 1919 and 138,824 in 1920 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2003). This wave of immigrants included an influx of foreign-educated engineers, mainly from Great Britain and the U.S. (Millard 1988). During this era, prior to the closure of the engineering profession in Canada, engineering professional periodicals published articles identifying an ongoing discussion among engineering society members about the profession's status and the earnings of engineers. One prominent narrative in this discussion suggests that Canadian engineers' disappointing labour market outcomes were the product of competition from a large number of non-Canadian practitioners working in Canada. The perception of foreign-trained engineers as a threat to the livelihood of Canadian-educated engineers coincided with a period of rising Canadian nationalism (Knowles 2000).
Calls for greater protection of the employment prospects, salary levels, and professional interests of Canadian engineers, especially among the younger, less-prosperous members of the society, prompted the EIC to convene an Advisory Committee on Legislation in 1919. The purpose of this committee was to draft and propose a standardized licensing bill in all provincial legislatures, which would create provincial self-governing engineering regulatory associations (Professional Organizations Committee 1978). The political influence of these arguments and their proponents was significant: soon after the proposed licensing bills were submitted to the provincial governments, their elements were incorporated into provincial regulatory legislation. By mid-1920, every provincial legislature, except Ontario, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, responded to increased political pressure by passing, in various forms, the licensing bills proposed by the EIC (Millard 1988). These provincial bills called for mandatory...
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