2022 Year in Review | Regulatory Roundup

Check out some of APEGA’s 2022 regulatory accomplishments below. And when you've finished reading these, be sure to check out our Editors' Choice Top Articles of 2022!

1. GRAPHing Our Way to the Safest Alberta: APEGA’s New Permit Holder Review System

APEGA’s Professional Practice team is performing a greater number of permit holder practice reviews than ever before, thanks to the implementation of a new tiered, risk-based approach called the Graduated Risk Assessment of Permit Holders (GRAPH). Using compliance criteria and risk assessment tools to review permit holders in the initial and lower levels, GRAPH identifies permit holders who require further review and permit holders who do not. The latter group can have their practice review closed. This new approach enables APEGA to conduct more efficient and appropriate types of reviews to elevate the professions and ensure protection of the public.

Check Out Our New System

2. Preventing Tragedy Through Regulation—New Practice Standard Preserves Public Trust

After the occurrence of related incidents that caused injury and loss of life, APEGA Council saw the need to develop a clear and defined standard to regulate the practice of outsourcing engineering and geoscience work to prevent similar incidents in the future and to safeguard Alberta’s public welfare. The Relying on the Work of Others and Outsourcing practice standard defines the requirements APEGA licensed professionals and permit holders must follow when they outsource or rely on the work of others. After a year-long transition period, this practice standard became enforceable on May 1, 2022.

Is Your Practice in Compliance?

3. The Backbone of Your Practice

The Professional Practice Management Plan practice standard came into effect on May 1, 2022, giving permit holders a year-long transition period to comply with the standard before enforcement begins on May 1, 2023. Your Professional Practice Management Plan defines how you practise engineering and geoscience.

Learn More about This Key Tool for the Professions

4. Join Your Resolute Regulator

APEGA is a community of pride, and it's a place of roles and rules.

George Eynon, P.Geo., FGC, FEC (Hon.), current Alberta-director of Geoscientists Canada, welcomes students and new graduates of geoscience as they register with APEGA. He invites them to pore over the stores of knowledge of their predecessors, tracing footsteps and leaving their own.

5. An Investigation in Trust

Garth Jesperson is not who you would expect to encounter when you think of a professional investigator. He is warm and quick to laugh, yet his background is serious—he was an RCMP officer for 28 years, working in general policing and then in the Commercial Crime Unit in Edmonton investigating large-scale frauds. Now, he’s APEGA’s Director of Investigations.

6. Communicating the Rules at Play

Remember meeting friends at the park as a child to play the game the floor is lava? Establishing rules, adopting new parameters of play, staying atop the rainbow-hued steel structures—players brilliantly demonstrated ideal self- and co-regulation. We’re no longer children on a playground, but self-regulation remains a guiding process, exemplified by Alberta’s professional engineers and geoscientists—with much higher stakes.

Join Us at the Playground

Honourable Mention: Ten Things You Need to Know about Professional Practice

To finish, we're getting a little meta—check out a Top 10 list inside a roundup!

Self-regulation can be complicated, and for new registrants, it's a lot of information to take in. APEGA's Professional Practice Department took the time to chat about some of the basics.

Check Out Their Top Ten

Check out the Editors' Choice articles of 2022

As we whittle down the final days of the year, APEGA’s editors are reaching deep into the article vault to revisit the stories we published in 2022. During a year of committed change, mindful growth, and increasing optimism, we found promise and inspiration in the stories of our members and communities. Read the 2022 Year in Review | Editors' Choice.