Innovation Summer 2025

engineers who have taken the obligation have stopped wearing their rings or have moved the ring to their non working hand in protest. These issues came to a head in 2020. Wardens from Camp 5 in Vancouver, which encompasses UBC, SFU and the BCIT, were removed following several years of sexist and inappropriate comments made before, during, and after the ceremony. The 2020 Camp 5 ceremony was administered by the national corporation and Chief Warden Shara. Out of that scandal came a grassroots effort called “Retool the Ring” whose members aimed to rethink the entire proceeding and to bring to light issues shrouded by the ceremony’s historic privacy and solemnity. Beyond replacing Kipling’s poem and rethinking the ceremony, Retool the Ring opened a larger discussion on the role engineers play in society. In 2023, the group published an academic paper in Frontiers in Education , an online, not-for-profit academic journal, in which they noted “the ongoing discourse about the words, history and symbols associated with iron ring ritual is also a discussion of what engineering is and how the field and practice ought to be represented.” In that paper, the group pointed to the Greater Winnipeg Water District aqueduct. The aqueduct, which spans 154 km, is widely regarded as a modern feat of Canadian

“The past president of the Canadian Society of Engineers, nowadays known as Engineers Canada, came up with the notion in a speech to a whole bunch of his colleagues that we need some kind of esprit de corps, camaraderie, fellowship that would embrace all Canadian engineering graduates into something better than themselves.” The notion of a ceremony asking new engineers to take on the responsibilities that come with the profession quickly took form, and Kipling, an English poet and writer who enjoyed fame in his lifetime, was asked to write out the proceedings. “Almost within days, [Kipling] responded and delivered the original ceremony and the design of the ring, which we have to this day,” Shara said. Over the next century, hundreds of thousands of engineers listened and repeated Kipling’s words as they joined the ranks of their Canadian peers. Barring a few minor word changes in the 1990s to include women and tone down overt religious references, little has changed with the proceeding, despite many protests. Push to modernize Media reports and comments from change proponents highlight how some engineers have felt uneasy about Kipling’s ceremony as far back as the 1980s. Some

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Summer 2025

Innovation