Provincial associations governing geoscience professionals in British Columbia and Ontario respectively have signed a labour agreement allowing its members to perform short-term work in the other province without a licence.
Signatories of the deal, dubbed the Professional Geoscience Mobility Agreement, are the Association of Professional Geoscientists of B.C. (APEGBC) and the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario (APGO).
Typically, geoscience professionals – geologists, geophysicists and engineers, for example – must hold a licence in each of the provinces they work in. This agreement allows members of the APEGBC and APGO to work a maximum of 45 days in B.C. or Ontario without obtaining such documents.
The agreement will take effect January 1, 2014, and will be implemented as a two-year pilot–program. It is the only agreement of its kind among Canadian geoscience regulators.
The APEGBC is the regulatory body for the engineering and geoscience professions in B.C. It has more than 29,000 members. The APGO governs geoscience professionals in Ontario. It has more than 2,000 members.
