INNOVATION March-April 2018

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co-op option and will be tailored to what the North really needs: cold-weather engineering. “A temperature of –30°C changes things,” says Whitcombe. “Building for –30°C is different from building for the temperatures in southern BC. We’ve got three pulp mills up here [in Prince George], a refinery, brewery, winery, heavy-duty industrial sites. Right now, they have to send to Vancouver for something to be fabricated and then have to modify it to suit our climate.” Post-secondary engineering options outside of the Lower Mainland and Victoria are few and far between. They include a civil engineering degree at UBC’s Okanagan campus and one- or two- year engineering certificate or university transfer programs at the College of the Rockies, North Island College, Selkirk College, and Thompson Rivers University. The College of New Caledonia (CNC) in Prince George currently offers a one-year Engineering Applied Science certificate. Students may then choose to transfer to second-year engineering at UBC, the University of Victoria, the University of Calgary, or the joint UNBC/UBC environmental engineering program. With its portion of the new provincial funding, CNC will develop a two-year civil engineering technologist diploma—the first engineering technologist program in BC to be offered north of Kamloops—with a total of 50 spaces by 2021–22. While the technologist diploma could be an end in itself for many students, CNC and UNBC are collaborating to ensure students can choose to bridge to the new UNBC civil engineering program.

If the provincial funding is increased as planned over the next few years, UNBC expects to be graduating 70 engineers per year by 2022–23, while CNC should produce 25 civil engineering technologists annually. “I come from the North, and when I had to go down to UBC for school, it was a huge culture shock,” says Lee Peltz, P.Eng., Project Engineer with McElhanney Consulting Services Ltd. in Prince George and chair of Engineers and Geoscientists BC’s Central Interior Branch. “I did not even consider staying in Vancouver after I finished, and I am not unique. There are more like me at McElhanney. So I think UNBC’s civil engineering program will be fantastic. I wish it was around when I graduated high school.” Peltz also thinks a new pool of local civil engineers and technologists will be a boon for his company and other local consultants. “We have had a really hard time getting people not from the North to move here and stay here for more than maybe a year or two.” Many northern resource companies, as well as local governments and human resource departments for big infrastructure projects such as Site C, have experienced the same problem. “We know that when we acquire new engineers from southern BC, they tend to be a flight risk,” says Olaf Starck, P.Eng., Engineering Manager at Canfor Pulp Ltd.’s Northwood Pulp Mill, which has already hired a significant number of UNBC’s environmental engineers. “It’s costly for us to have to continuously recruit for new positions. Then we train them up and they leave. When we have people locally educated, we know they have the skills we need, plus they’ve lived here already for at least three or four years and they know what the lifestyle and climate are like.”

Says UNBC’s Todd Whitcombe, “We are looking for new faculty now for the new engineering streams. Once they are up and running, we will look at offering other engineering disciplines and perhaps geoscience too.” He thinks these new offerings will happen eventually, but it’s “baby steps” for now. Albert Koehler, for one, appreciates the progress made so far but is impatient with the wait for more options. “As a consultant,” he says, “I’ve seen the potential that is here in the North, and it’s unlimited. If we can lift our economy, it will be good for the whole province. We just have to have the right people being innovative, coming up with new patents, new ideas. Let’s educate our people here in all areas of science and technology, including engineering, and the rest will follow.” j

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