President's Notebook
APEGA
OUR INNOVATIONS AND DISCOVERIES AFFECT PEOPLE’S LIVES, AND NOW, MORE THAN EVER, WE NEED TO BE MINDFUL OF OUR ETHICS, OUR PROFESSIONAL INTEGRITY, AND THE IMPACT WE HAVE ON SOCIETY.
cleaned up, and in 1926 its buildings were moved to the towns of Banff and Canmore. Bankhead: The Twenty Year Town contains drawings of the geology of the site and the engineering innovations the mining there required, along with photos of the town and town life. The book ends by describing a 50-year reunion at the townsite of people who had lived there. The stories that come out of this one little town illustrate how long our professions have been working together in Alberta to meet society’s demands, in this case mining coal for the war effort. Geologists found the coal deposits and mapped them. Engineers, with the help of geoscientists, selected or devised the innovations necessary to get the coal to market. These stories also remind us that the boom-and-bust path our province has travelled goes back a long way. Yet another lesson is that our innovations and discoveries affect people’s lives, and that we now, more than ever, need to be mindful of our ethics, our professional integrity, and the impact we have on society. That brings us, of course, to APEGA. OUR ASSOCIATION’S JOURNEY In 1995, during our 75th anniversary, The PEGG newspaper traced the history of the Association in a series of articles. One of them, titled Association Experienced Growth Spurt in the 1950s and published in February 1995, looked at the 30th anniversary of what was then called the Association of Professional Engineers of Alberta (APEA). In the wake of the end of the Second World War, many ex-servicemen had enrolled in engineering when they returned from overseas. A big concern in 1950 was that a glut of engineers would soon be on the market. This glut never materialized and as the decade progressed, Alberta actually faced a shortage of Professional Engineers. The provincial government of the day, meanwhile, decided to review several of the legislative acts enabling professionals to self-regulate, and there were government officials who thought that the government should take over professional licensure.
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