By Canadian Immigrant Magazine
Internationally trained engineers will no longer be required to have Canadian experience to be licensed in Ontario, as the province adopts a new law that’s meant to remove the barriers keeping skilled immigrants from working in their former professions.
On Tuesday, Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), which represents the fourth largest regulated profession in the province with 85,649 members, becomes the first professional regulatory body to remove the requirement from their application criteria.
“By no longer requiring proof of Canadian experience when applying for an engineering licence, PEO will effectively ensure that qualified international applicants are licensed fairly and without undue delay so they can actively work as engineers,” said Jennifer Quaglietta, the regulator’s CEO registrar.
“Our new application process for professional engineering licences is efficient, transparent and fair, and will provide most applicants with a registration decision within six months of submitting a completed application.”
The lack of Canadian work experience has been cited as a key barrier to earning professional designations in Canada by skilled immigrants in returning to their fields of training.
In 2021, amid a labour shortage during the pandemic, the Ontario government introduced new regulations to force some professional regulators to drop Canadian work-experience requirements from their licensing criteria — and to speed up processing times.
“This is, quite frankly, a game-changer for newcomers coming here, but also for businesses who are struggling with a huge labour shortage,” said Labour Minister Monte McNaughton, whose ministry also oversees training, skills development and immigration.
“Only a quarter of internationally trained immigrants in our province are working in the professions they studied for. This is an injustice to these workers, and it doesn’t take a math major to figure out the current numbers don’t add up.”
He said roughly 300,000 jobs continue to go unfilled across the province every day, including thousands in engineering and it costs billions in lost productivity.