The Province calls Michael Ferguson an Engineering Officer. The regulator, Engineers and Geoscientists BC, says he is not one of its registrants. Section 52 (3) bars a title that implies otherwise — and the only test is what the public perceived.

01 Engineers and Geoscientists BC answered the Rady Creek complaint on 7 October 2026. They confirmed he is not one of their registrants, and forwarded his job title to their misuse-of-title team

A large group of people in our coalition recently filed the same complaint about the deactivation prescription for Rady Creek Forest Service Road 0321.02. It went to two regulators and one oversight board. What came back is itself the story.⁰²

Forest Professionals BC regulates Michael Ferguson and Jordan Pyette. It is the one body with the power to examine their conduct. This is what it sent back, in full:

The regulator that does not govern them read it, answered it in substance, and referred part of it onward. The oversight board read it the next day. The body that could act did not open it. The body that could not act answered in substance. This page exists to ask why the regulators are not regulating.⁰²⁰³

The substantive answer came from the Complaint Intake Analyst at Engineers and Geoscientists BC, timed 7 October 2026, 16:54 UTC. It is reproduced in full below, exactly as it arrived.⁰¹

Dear John D. Rady, We note that Michael Ferguson (“Ferguson”) and Jordan Pyette are not registrants of Engineers and Geoscientists BC. As such, their conduct falls outside the jurisdiction of the Engineers and Geoscientists BC Complaint Process. However, you advised that Ferguson is using the title “Engineering Officer” in their job description. We have referred this concern to our Unauthorized Practice and Misuse of Title team for review and consideration.

Read from the complainants’ own mailbox on 7 October 2026.⁰¹

Three things in that paragraph matter, and two of them are easy to get wrong. The first is that the conduct limb is correctly declined: Part 6 of the Professional Governance Act, which governs conduct and competence, reaches registrants and former registrants only, and neither forest professional named in the complaint is a registrant of Engineers and Geoscientists BC.⁰⁴ The second is that the title limb was not downgraded by being moved. It was moved out of a forum that cannot touch a non-registrant and into the only forum that can, which Engineers and Geoscientists BC describes in its own words as “a civil process … that can, in certain circumstances, result in litigation… to secure injunctive relief.”¹²

The third is the one that governs every sentence after it. A referral is not a finding. The title was referred “for review and consideration.” No determination has been made, no enforcement file is confirmed open, and nobody has been found to have done anything. Any reading of that email as a verdict is a misreading of it.

That question has two halves and both are answerable today from Engineers and Geoscientists BC’s own published material. When has a short answer: there is no published timetable, and the regulator has said in advance that it will not tell a complainant anything.¹¹ Under which policies has a long answer, and it runs through a regulation, a bylaw written in January 2025, a second bylaw written beside it that hands Cabinet an override, and a published enforcement record in which no government body has ever appeared. The rest of this page is that answer.

One limb of the complaint the reply does not reach. The same filing concerned a covered professional seal — R. J. Williams, P.Geo., registrant #45161 — and the permit to practise of SNT Geotechnical Ltd., number 1001083, both of which sit squarely inside Engineers and Geoscientists BC’s own jurisdiction over its own registrants. The reply addresses jurisdiction over conduct, and the title, and stops. Whether a separate answer on that limb is coming is not stated.²⁸

And one name that does not belong in the title story at all. The reply refers the title of one person. Jordan Pyette’s title was not referred, is not reserved by Engineers and Geoscientists BC, by the applied science technologists’ regulator or by Forest Professionals BC, and does not appear again on this page.⁰¹⁰⁶

02 Michael Ferguson is one of eighteen people in the British Columbia public service holding the title “Engineering Officer”, and all eighteen are in the Ministry of Forests

Before anyone forms a view about one man in one district office, here is the number that ought to arrive first. The Province’s own official staff-directory extract of 9 April 2026 contains exactly 18 people whose title is “Engineering Officer”. Every one of them works for the Ministry of Forests. Counting the compound variants in the same family — “District Engineering Officer”, “Engineering Officer Supervisor”, “Engineering Officer, Rail Corridors” and the rest — the family runs to 31 posts across 22 organisational units. The Selkirk Natural Resource District holds 1 of the 31.²³

That count does not narrow this file. It widens it. The title at Rady Creek was written by the Ministry of Forests 31 times over, across BC Timber Sales business areas and natural resource districts alike, and the Province advertised it publicly in its own job postings. What Engineers and Geoscientists BC has been handed is not one man’s business card. It is a provincial naming convention for forest-road work — and the ministry wrote it.²³²⁶

There is an obvious answer to that, and the regulator has already rejected it, in print, in advance. Its own published guidance puts the question in exactly these words — “My job title contravenes the Act, but it was given to me by my employer. Can I still use that title?” — and answers it: “No. The obligation to comply with the Act’s misuse of title prohibitions follows the individual who is using the title. If your title contravenes the misuse of title prohibitions under the Act, then you must revise that title, even if it was given to you by your employer.” The regulator has committed itself to that position publicly, which is what makes this harder for it to leave alone rather than easier. The employer-gave-it-to-me answer does not close the file. It opens a second one, against the employer.¹¹¹⁴

And “Engineering Officer” is not even the hardest title in the Ministry of Forests to defend

The same extract carries 151 rows across the public service whose title uses the bare noun “Engineer”, in 109 distinct forms — 71 in the Ministry of Transportation and Transit, 20 in the Ministry of Forests, 22 in Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. Eleven of the Ministry of Forests ones are “Area Engineer” or a variant; the others include “Bridge Engineer”, “Bridge Standards Engineer”, “Senior Structures and Roads Engineer”. Across the whole service, 283 rows in 176 distinct title strings contain “engineer” in some form, spread over 12 ministries, commissions and corporations, and 11 of them use a variant of “Engineer in Training” — which is one of the three reserved titles.²³⁰⁵

So “Engineering Officer” is not the ministry’s boldest use of the word. It is its mildest. A directory records a title and never a credential, so which holders of those 20 Ministry of Forests posts are registered cannot be established from it What can be said is the shape of the thing: a referral about one compound title sits at the near edge of a naming practice that runs to 283 rows and 176 distinct titles across 12 ministries, 11 of which use a variant of a title that is reserved.²³⁰⁵

The Province still publishes the title to the public, on a road-safety page

Of the 22 natural resource district road-safety pages the Ministry of Forests maintains, 1 carries the title: the Cascades Natural Resource District page, whose road notice was updated 3 September 2026, gives an “Engineering Officer” as the contact for questions about an alternate route and for reporting road safety issues. The holder named there has nothing to do with Rady Creek. This is the Province, in 2026, publishing the title to the public as the contact for road safety — and section 52 (3) turns on the manner in which a title is used, which makes a public road-safety contact line the sharpest possible context for the question.²⁵⁰⁴

And the Selkirk district’s own road-safety page shows the ministry knows exactly which word means a registrant. That page names the Ministry of Forests Engineering Branch and the Selkirk Resource District Engineering department — units, not people — and where a registrant did the work it reaches for the reserved title and uses it correctly: a Bayonne Creek Forest Service Road bridge “has been load rated to 0 tonnes by a Professional Engineer.” The ministry writes “Professional Engineer” when a professional engineer did the work. For these eighteen posts it chose a different word.²⁵

03 The Province’s published classification structure reserves the engineer label to registered people — and then the Ministry of Forests lays the word “Engineering” over posts it classifies as Scientific/Technical Officer

Here is the finding that turns a count into an argument. “Engineering Officer” is not a classification in the British Columbia public service at all. The Province publishes 81 classifications under its BCGEU job-evaluation plan and 19 under its professional-employees plan. “Engineering Officer” appears in neither list. The classification underneath the working title is a Scientific/Technical Officer, grade 27 or 27R, which is what the Province’s own postings for the title say in their own words.²⁴²⁶

And the two classifications that do carry the word engineer sit in the other plan entirely, under a published rule about registration:

What the Province calls the job, against what the Province calls the person

	The classification the Province publishes	The working title the Province assigns
Name	Scientific technical officer (STO), grade 27 / 27R	Engineering Officer
Uses the word engineer	No. The word appears only in the two licensed science officer classifications, in the other plan.	Yes, 18 times over, and 31 times across the whole family.
Registration required	None. The Scientific/Technical Officer plan covers engineering-project work without requiring membership of any engineering body.	None — the Province’s postings for this title require Forest Professionals BC registration, naming a professional engineer only as an alternative.
Where the engineer label does carry a duty	Licensed science officer levels 2 to 5: holders must be fully registered or licensed with the named association, and Engineers and Geoscientists BC is on that list.	Nowhere. A working title carries no registration rule at all.

Read from the Province’s own salary look-up tool and the two classification pages beneath it on 7 October 2026: “Engineering Officer” does not appear among the 81 BCGEU and 19 professional-plan classifications the Province publishes.²⁴

And what the Province told the public an engineer had done

The 11 May 2021 letter was not the only time. The same claim went up the chain and out through an elected office, and it was always the same sentence.

Four months apart, a Regional Executive Director and an MLA’s office tell two different members of the public the same thing: an engineer prescribed this road. The prescription in the ministry’s own file was written by a registered forest technologist.³⁴³⁵

And when the club asked the District Manager directly, the wording changed. “This was completed by our engineering technician… The section starting at 1+150 incorporates the recommendations of a geotechnical engineer.” Michael Ferguson was copied on that email. Asked in public, it was prescribed by an engineer. Asked directly, an engineer’s recommendations were incorporated by a technician.³⁶

What the ministry’s own manual calls this post

The clearest evidence of what the word is doing is not in a job posting. It is in the Engineering Manual the Ministry of Forests publishes and revises, and in the authorisation templates it issues with it.

Read that disjunction again. The ministry writes its District Engineering Officer and a professional engineer as alternative sources of the same engineering recommendation. Not as supervisor and subordinate — as either. That is the Province treating the post as interchangeable with a registrant for the purpose that matters.³¹

The same manual tells the public where to take technical requests: to the “local Ministry district office (attention: Engineering Officer)”, and “the Engineering Officer will review requests”. The ministry’s authorisation templates for Significant Road Work carry the post as a standing recipient on every letter, bracketed with the Area Engineering Group Leader and the Ministry Engineer.³¹³²

And the word was not inherited. The 2018 edition of the same manual contains no “Engineering Officer” at all — the deactivation prescriptions were reviewed by the “District engineering technician”. Between 2018 and 2026 the ministry renamed its own technician post, and wrote the new name into the alternative to a professional engineer. Somebody chose that word.³³³¹

So the Province drew the same line Engineers and Geoscientists BC would draw, and then stepped over it with a working title. The post whose duties necessitate membership of the engineering body is called a licensed science officer and its holder must be registered. The post that does engineering-project work without registration is called a Scientific/Technical Officer, and it is deliberately not called an engineer. Then a working title using the word was laid over the second one, 31 times.²⁴²³

Two archived Ministry of Forests postings for the title, and what they say the job does

These two postings are the Province’s own public descriptions of the classification. Neither is the Selkirk position description and neither is Michael Ferguson’s job description. They establish what the Province says this working title is expected to do, which is the fact the regulator’s own test turns on.²⁶

Both postings read from Internet Archive captures of the Forest Professionals BC career centre; the live pages now return HTTP 404 as expired postings. The requirements in either posting are not attributes of the Selkirk post, which has not been read.²⁶

Hold those descriptions against the regulator’s own safe harbour. A compound engineering title is permitted for a non-registrant provided that their role is purely business in scope, meaning it involves no engineering advice or services, inside the organisation or outside it. The Province’s own postings for this working title say the holder plans and manages the engineering program, is accountable for reviewing and approving engineering activities, leads engineering projects, and acts as Professional of Record on road or bridge projects. That is not purely business in scope. On the regulator’s published test, the Province’s own wording pushes its own working title toward the prohibited side.¹¹²⁶

For the other seventeen posts, the document that would settle it is the position description, and that is a freedom-of-information request rather than an argument. ²⁹ But at Rady Creek it does not have to be settled that way, because the file already answers it.

Three prescriptions were written for this road. The first, of October 2020, and its revision of 11 May 2021, were both written by Tina Zimmermann, RFT — a registered forest technologist, the district’s engineering technician, not an engineer. Only the third, in September 2026, was written by a professional geoscientist, and it opens “At the request of Michael Ferguson, RFT”. The prescriptions themselves name a prescriber and not a ministry contact; it is the covering email of 11 May 2021 that gives Michael Ferguson as the person to take it up with, under the title “Resource Officer-Engineering”.²⁸²³

So the engineering on this road was written by forest technologists, commissioned by a forest technologist, and routed through a man carrying an engineering title. That is not a job description anybody has to request. It is what the documents themselves record.²⁸

04 The law does not ask what anyone meant by the title. It asks what the title tells the person reading it

Section 52 (3) of the Professional Governance Act does not ask what anyone intended. It asks whether a name or description is used “in any manner that expresses or implies” that the person is a registrant, or is authorised to practise. That test is answered by the reader, not the writer.⁰⁵

On 11 May 2021 the Selkirk district wrote to stakeholders to tell them the Rady road would be permanently deactivated with no ATV access left open. The same message twice credits the decision to “a Professional Engineer” — once to “previous recommendations by a Professional Engineer”, and again to pulling the steeper sections back “as recommended by the Professional Engineer”. It then tells anyone who objects where to take it: “please contact Mike Ferguson, Resource Officer-Engineering, Selkirk Resource District-Castlegar”.²⁸

The document that does both things at once

Read that the way the people who received it did. The engineering is attributed to a professional engineer, and the man you are directed to about it carries an engineering title. Nobody in that exchange is told that the Province’s classification structure contains no such classification, that its two engineer classifications both require registration with Engineers and Geoscientists BC, or that this registrant belongs to a different regulator altogether. So what is the title for?²⁴²³

Nobody has to have meant anything by it. That is the point of the provision, and it is why the obvious objection does not answer it: British Columbia reserves exactly three engineering titles, and the bare word “engineer” is not among them.⁰⁵

That matters because the Professional Governance Act carries two separate prohibitions on titles, and they are not equally strong. One is keyed to those three strings. The other is keyed to the effect of whatever words are used. The title at Rady Creek escapes the first and engages the second, and the difference between them is the whole legal question on this file.⁰⁴

Professional Governance Act, SBC 2018 c. 47, ss. 52 and 53, read from the consolidated statute on 7 October 2026.⁰⁴

Engineers and Geoscientists BC describes its own mandate in exactly those terms. Its enforcement landing page says it has a statutory duty to stop non-registrants from “Engineers and Geoscientists BC has a statutory duty under the Professional Governance Act to protect the public interest by taking action to stop non-registrants (including individuals, corporations, and partnerships) from: … Misusing reserved titles or other names, titles, descriptions or abbreviations that express or imply that they are registrants, are associated with Engineers and Geoscientists BC, or are entitled to practice the professions of engineering or geoscience in British Columbia.” That is section 52 (3) paraphrased almost word for word, which is why the referral is not a formality.¹⁰

The regulator’s own worked examples, and the line they draw

Engineers and Geoscientists BC publishes a table of titles a non-registrant may and may not use. One row in it is the single most useful sentence available on this question, and it is the regulator’s own.¹¹

Titles a non-registrant may use, from the regulator’s own Unauthorized Practice or Title FAQs — archived capture of 21 March 2026

Title used	Registrant	Non-registrant
“Jamie Smith, Engineer”	Yes	No
“Jamie Smith, Mechanical Engineer”	Yes	No
“Jamie Smith, Firmware Engineer”	Yes	No
“Jamie Smith, Engineering Specialist”	Yes	No
“Jamie Smith, Geoscience Professional”	Yes	No
“Jamie Smith, B.Eng., B.Sc., BASc”	Yes	Yes

The highlighted row is the one that carries the argument. “Engineering Specialist” — a non-registrant may not use it. Note what that proves: the offending string is not “Engineer” at all. It is “Engineering” plus a generic role noun, with no discipline attached and no claim of registration made. “Engineering Officer” is built the same way. ¹¹

And then the regulator draws the line back the other way, in the same document, in a paragraph that is the Province’s best friend on this file:

Read from an archived capture of 21 March 2026.¹¹

Put the table and that paragraph side by side and the whole question changes shape. “Engineering Specialist” is barred. “Engineering Manager” and “Director of Engineering” are permitted — provided the role is purely business in scope. “Engineering Officer” is not addressed, and sits between the two. So the lawfulness of the title does not turn on the words. On the regulator’s own published test it turns on one question: is the role purely business in scope, or does it involve providing engineering advice or services? That question is answered, badly for the Province, by the Province’s own job postings — § 03.

So this is the question, and it is the only one that matters on this file. Is Michael Ferguson in violation of section 52 (3)? The provision has two limbs and the first is already satisfied: it binds a person who is not a registrant, and Engineers and Geoscientists BC has confirmed in writing that he is not one. That leaves the second, and it is the whole case — was the title “Engineering Officer”, issued by the Ministry of Forests and published to contractors, to clubs and to the public, used in a manner that expresses or implies he is registered, or entitled to practise? Nobody has answered it. The regulator has not decided it, and no court has tested the provision on a government job title. This page does not settle it; it puts it.

And the question does not stop at one desk. Are all eighteen in violation of section 52 (3)? For any holder who is a registrant of Engineers and Geoscientists BC the provision cannot bite at all — it binds only people who are not registrants — and the Province’s directory records a title and never a credential, so which of them are registered is not a thing this page can tell you. But for any holder who is not, the question arrives on identical facts: the same title, issued by the same ministry, published the same way, to the same kinds of reader. Nothing in the wording of the provision distinguishes the Selkirk district from the other twenty-one units that carry it. The complaint gave the regulator one name. The directory gives it eighteen.

05 British Columbia prescribed itself a registrant of Engineers and Geoscientists BC for Forest Act Part 8 — the Part that contains the deactivation power being used on the Rady Creek road

This is the part of the record nobody asked for and nobody can argue with, because it is three documents in a row. The Province is not a bystander to the engineering regulator’s jurisdiction. It wrote itself into that jurisdiction by order in council, and it did so specifically in respect of forest roads.⁰⁷

1. The Act defines a “firm” to include a ministry

   “firm” means either of the following: (a) a government registrant; (b) a legal entity or a combination of legal entities that is engaged in a regulated practice … “government registrant” means a ministry or agency of the government that the Lieutenant Governor in Council may prescribe by regulation.

   Professional Governance Act s. 1. A ministry the Lieutenant Governor in Council prescribes is a government registrant, and a government registrant is a firm for every purpose of the Act.⁰⁴

2. The regulation prescribes the road ministry, by the function it administers, with respect to Engineers and Geoscientists BC by name

   For the purposes of the definition of “government registrant” in section 1 (1) of the Act, with respect to the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of British Columbia the following are prescribed: (a) the ministry of the minister responsible for any of the following: (i) Part 8 [Roads and Rights of Way] of the Forest Act; (ii) Division 2 [Roads] of Part 3 of the Forest and Range Practices Act; (iii) Part 4 [Highways] or 5 [Use of Highways] of the Transportation Act; (a.1) the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority; (b) the British Columbia Safety Authority; (c) the British Columbia Energy Regulator; (d) the Workers’ Compensation Board.

   Professional Governance General Regulation, B.C. Reg. 107/2019, s. 1.1. Not a general statement that government is covered: a named list, headed with the engineering regulator’s own legal name.⁰⁷

3. Part 8 of the Forest Act is where forest service roads, and the power to deactivate one, live

   Part 8 is headed Roads and Rights of Way, and it contains:

   s. 115, road permits; s. 119.3, Deactivation of road; s. 120.1, declaration of a forest service road; s. 121 (1) (a), the minister’s power to construct and maintain roads and trails; s. 121 (9) (a), the power to discontinue and close a right of way or forest service road.

   Rady Creek Forest Service Road 0321.02 is a road under Part 8, and the prescription numbered 26.510.01.01.16 is an exercise of the deactivation power inside it. The ministry prescribed as a registrant of Engineers and Geoscientists BC for Part 8 is the ministry deactivating this road.⁰⁸²⁸

Two consequences follow immediately, and a third is still open. First, the Act binds the Province: British Columbia reversed the common-law presumption by statute — “Unless it specifically provides otherwise, an enactment is binding on the government.” — and the Professional Governance Act contains no Crown exclusion.⁰⁹ The loose intuition that government is outside the Act is simply wrong.

So the Act reaches the Province. Two consequences follow, and they are simple.

A ministry is treated as a firm, and a firm faces five times the individual penalty — up to $500,000. The Ministry of Forests is prescribed for Forest Act Part 8, the Part that carries the deactivation power being used at Rady Creek, and it is named in the engineering regulator’s own firm-regulation material.⁰⁴¹⁴

One thing is not on the public record: whether the Ministry has actually registered. Being prescribed as eligible and being registered are different things, and the regulator’s firm directory answers every automated request with HTTP 403. That is a blocked read, not an absent record.¹⁶¹⁷

It matters less than it looks, because the answer cannot get the Province off the hook — only change which hook. If the Ministry is registered, the regulator’s own bylaw makes it responsible for policing the titles it hands out. If it is not, the statute applies to it directly, at the higher ceiling. Either way the exposure lands on the employer that wrote the title.⁰⁴¹⁴

06 The regulator has already answered this twice, and the two answers point at two different parties

One answer is about the person using the title. The other is about the firm that assigned it. Both are the regulator’s own published words.¹¹¹⁴

So the employee cannot sign the problem away and the employer cannot delegate it. The statute follows whoever uses the title; the bylaw follows whoever handed it out. At Rady Creek those are two different parties, and the Province is one of them.⁰⁴¹⁴

There is a tidy proof of which way this runs. Under the Province’s own indemnity regulation, the Crown pays the legal costs of an excluded employee facing a professional-body proceeding over conduct in the course of employment. So if the title is ever tested, the Province funds the defence of a title the Province wrote.²⁷

07 And Engineers and Geoscientists BC wrote a Cabinet override into the one sanction against a government ministry that the public would ever get to see

If the forests ministry is a registrant firm, there is one outcome on this file the public could actually observe: a sanction on the ministry’s permit to practise. The regulator’s own bylaws brake that outcome, delay its announcement, and hand the final word to Cabinet. This is written down, in the bylaws, and it is the strongest structural reason to expect the Rady Creek title to be handled quietly.¹⁵

Bylaw 5.12.1 lets the regulator designate a registrant firm as a Public Sector Firm where that firm is a Government Registrant or a local public body. The forests ministry, being a prescribed government registrant, is in that category by definition. Then:

And the power that paragraph (c) is waiting on, in the Act itself: under section 83, a decision to suspend or cancel the registration of a firm registrant may, by order of the Lieutenant Governor in Council, be rescinded, varied or substituted.⁰⁴

Bylaws read from the regulator’s own consolidated PDF; section 83 read from the consolidated Act on 7 October 2026. Where the firm is a ministry, Cabinet holds a veto over the regulator’s firm-side sanction, and the regulator must sit on the announcement until Cabinet has decided whether to use it.⁰⁴¹⁵

No sanction has been imposed on anyone and no enforcement file against any ministry is confirmed to exist. What is established is the architecture: the Province made itself answerable to this regulator for forest roads, and then the one visible consequence of that arrangement was fitted with an off-ramp that the Province’s own Cabinet controls.

08 The only test is what the public perceived — so here is who read this title, where they read it, and what it told them

The provision has two limbs. The first is closed. It binds a person who is not a registrant, and Engineers and Geoscientists BC has confirmed in writing, on 7 October 2026, that Michael Ferguson is not one of its registrants. That is not an allegation on this page; it is the regulator’s own sentence.⁰¹⁰⁴

The second limb asks what the title conveys, and the Act sets the bar low on purpose. It is enough that a name or description is used “in any manner that expresses or implies” registration. Nobody need have been misled. No harm need follow. No intention need be shown. And under section 106 (4) a single act is sufficient to prove the offence — one use, once.⁰⁴⁰⁵

That leaves one question, and it belongs to the reader rather than the writer: what did this title tell the people who met it? The record answers that in public. The stakeholders told in writing on 11 May 2021 to take their objections to “Mike Ferguson, Resource Officer-Engineering” — in the same message that twice credits the decision to “a Professional Engineer”. Anyone who searches the Province’s own public staff directory, where the title stands beside his name. And a member of the public on the Province’s own road-safety page for the Cascades Natural Resource District, updated 3 September 2026, who is given an Engineering Officer as the person to call about road safety. These are not internal filings. They are the places the public meets the title.²⁸²³²⁵

The regulator’s own safe harbour, answered by the Province’s own postings

Engineers and Geoscientists BC permits a non-registrant a compound engineering title on one condition: that the role is purely business in scope, involving no engineering advice or services, inside the organisation or outside it. That is the regulator’s own test, published in its own FAQ.¹¹

The Province’s own advertisements for this working title say the holder plans and manages the engineering program, is accountable for reviewing and approving engineering activities, leads engineering projects, and acts as Professional of Record on road or bridge projects. On the regulator’s published test, the employer’s own words answer the employer’s own case. Nobody has to obtain a document to see it; the Province published it.²⁶

What the Act says that costs

Multiply it out. Eighteen people hold the title. At the individual ceiling that is $3.6 million. The firm ceiling is $500,000 and a single act proves an offence, so eighteen acts against the ministry is a further $9 million. The Act puts $12.6 million on one job title, and every dollar of the firm half would be the Province paying a regulator the Province created by statute.⁰⁴

And it does not stop at the people carrying the title. The Act reaches the people who assigned it and the people who kept it there, in its own words. Section 106 (5): “If an offence under this Act is committed by a firm, each director, manager, secretary or other officer of that firm who assented to the commission of the offence is a party to that offence.” Section 99 (3): “If a firm contravenes this Act …, an employee, officer, director or agent of the firm who authorized, permitted or acquiesced in the contravention is also liable under this section even though the firm is liable for or pays an administrative penalty.” A naming convention has authors, and the Act says authors are parties.⁰⁴

s. 106 (2): “A person who commits an offence under subsection (1) or (1.1) is liable on conviction, (a) in the case of an individual, to a fine of not more than $200 000 or to a term of imprisonment of not more than 2 years, or both, and (b) in the case of a firm, to a fine of not more than $500 000.” s. 106 (4): “In any prosecution under this Act, it is sufficient to prove that the accused has committed a single act of unauthorized practice or has committed on one occasion any of the acts prohibited by this Act.” Read from the consolidated statute on 7 October 2026.⁰⁴

09 The regulators have been told. Here is what each of them did with it — and what the title went on doing in public meanwhile

None of the above is a secret, and none of it is new to the bodies whose job it is. The complaint went to all three. Forest Professionals BC — the one regulator with power over Michael Ferguson’s conduct — returned a notice that it had been deleted without being read. The Forest Practices Board, which has no power over registrants at all, read it the next day. Engineers and Geoscientists BC answered, and referred the title.⁰²⁰³⁰¹

And Engineers and Geoscientists BC does not describe acting on a title like this one as a power it may choose to use. It describes it as a duty. Its own words: “Engineers and Geoscientists BC has a statutory duty under the Professional Governance Act to protect the public interest by taking action to stop non-registrants (including individuals, corporations, and partnerships) from: … Misusing reserved titles or other names, titles, descriptions or abbreviations that express or imply that they are registrants, are associated with Engineers and Geoscientists BC, or are entitled to practice the professions of engineering or geoscience in British Columbia.”¹⁰

A statutory duty to take action is not a discretion to decline. So the published record is not a forecast about this file. It is a fact about the regulator. In 22 years it has obtained ten court orders and signed eighteen written agreements — and the courts give it what it asks for, including a permanent injunction with costs, and in Québec a municipality that pleaded guilty and was fined $25,000 over a culvert. It opens roughly a hundred of these files every year. Not one outcome in 22 years has ever been against a British Columbia ministry, agency, municipality, health authority or any other public body.^1319201822

That is not for want of the tools. It is what happens when the respondent is a government. The only time a Canadian regulator has laid charges against a government corporation over this, it withdrew every one of them. The regulator publishes no timeline for these files and states in advance that a complainant will be told nothing. And — as § 07 sets out — its own bylaws delay the one sanction against a government ministry the public would ever see, withhold its publication, and hand Cabinet the power to rescind it.²¹¹¹¹²

Meanwhile the title keeps working on the public

While the question sits unanswered, the title goes on doing what a title does. It is the contact line on a government road-safety page. It is the signature on the correspondence a club receives about its road. It is the authority a contractor reads in a tender. And on the one document in the Rady Creek file that carried a real professional’s seal, the copy issued to bidders had that seal, the signature and the date behind fifty-three white rectangles.²⁸

A title that implies registration is worth something precisely because readers act on it. That is what section 52 (3) exists to stop, and it is the one thing nobody in this file has been asked to account for.⁰⁴

Whoever answers for it, somebody pays

The Excluded Employees (Legal Proceedings) Indemnity Regulation, B.C. Reg. 62/2012 can cover a government employee’s costs in exactly the proceedings this could become — a professional body proceeding, a prosecution, a penalty proceeding — but only where the conduct “was not dishonest, malicious or otherwise in bad faith”. So there are two possible payers and both are consequences: the public purse, or an employee the Province has decided to call dishonest in order not to cover him. Whether this post is an excluded position under that regulation is not established.²⁷

One title, eighteen desks, and what the grey area buys

The referral names one man. The practice does not stop at him, and the Province is the reason it does not. 18 public servants hold this exact title and every one of them is in the Ministry of Forests. 31 posts carry a title in the same family, across 22 organisational units. The ministry wrote it, advertised it publicly in its own job postings, and publishes it to the public as the person to call about road safety. Seventeen of those desks have never been looked at by anyone.²³²⁶²⁵

A title that implies registration is not decoration. It is standing. It is what lets an instruction to destroy a public road read as an engineering decision rather than an administrative one — and an engineering decision is the kind of decision the public is not invited to argue with. That is not a theory about what a title is for. At Rady Creek the same district ran a second deactivation in the same years, under the same decision-maker, and the difference in what the public was given is a matter of record.³⁰

Same district, same years, same decision-maker.³⁰

On one road the public was consulted. On the other it was handed an Engineering Officer. Section 52 (3) does not ask whether anybody set out to buy that. It asks what the title conveyed to the people who read it — and what it conveyed, on the road where the consultation did not happen, was that the decision had already been made by someone qualified to make it. Eighteen desks carry this title. One of them has been put to the regulator. The other seventeen are operating in exactly the same grey, in the same ministry, over the same kind of road.⁰⁴²³

Eighteen people carry this title. The Act puts the exposure on it at $12.6 million, and that number does not go away because it is inconvenient. Somebody accounts for it. Is it the Province, which wrote the word into eighteen jobs and advertised them? The Minister of Forests, whose ministry holds every one of those posts and prescribed itself a registrant of the engineers’ regulator in the first place? The man in Castlegar who was handed a title he did not choose? Or the regulators — one that deleted the complaint unread, and one that calls stopping this a statutory duty and has never once used it on a government? And that is the arithmetic for a single desk. The ministry wrote this title eighteen times, and seventeen of those have never been asked a single question by anyone.^04131023

What is certain is that the answer is not theirs to withhold. Section 107 does not say the regulator may go to the court. It says the superintendent, the board of a regulatory body, “or any other person” may — on nothing more than “reason to believe that there has been or will be a contravention”. That is the route every published British Columbia title case has taken, and the statute leaves it open to anyone who can read a job title and a section number. A regulator that will not act on its own duty is not the end of this. It is only the end of doing it quietly.⁰⁴¹⁹

But a court order on one job title is not the repair this needs, and it never was. A title is the symptom. What the Rady Creek file documents is a district that could treat an engineering question as settled because it had written the word into a job, and a public that was never given the chance to ask. That is what has to change, and it changes in four specific ways.

Four demands

While the regulator reviews the title, the public has demands of its own — and they are the ones required to rectify the damage this conduct has already done. Not questions, and not a records request. They are owed by named bodies: Engineers and Geoscientists BC and Forest Professionals BC, the Office of the Superintendent of Professional Governance, the Minister of Forests, and every candidate on the 24 October 2026 ballot whose district contains a forest service road.

• Review the whole Rady Creek file, not one job title. Both regulators should examine the conduct on this road end to end — five years of a district claiming geotechnical recommendations it could not produce, three prescriptions that contradict one another, two of them written by forest technologists, a sealing professional’s name and seal covered on the copy issued to bidders, and a title the regulator has confirmed belongs to no registrant of its own. Forest Professionals BC returned a notice that the complaint had been deleted without being read. That file has to be opened and worked.
• Make the Ministry of Forests justify the title in public. Who approved “Engineering Officer”, on what authority, and why the word engineering sits over posts the Province itself classifies as Scientific/Technical Officer — 31 times, across 22 organisational units. The ministry wrote the convention. It should be the one to defend it, to the public, in writing.
• Mandate real consultation on every deactivation, not the ones it chooses. The same district has already shown what adequate looks like: on the Incomappleux it published a FAQ, mailed notice three years running, ran a newspaper advertisement and a formal comment period, and released draft prescriptions for review. That should be the floor for every road the ministry proposes to destroy, binding and not discretionary — because Rady Creek got a map and a data file sent to a lumber company.
• Require disclosure, on the face of the document, whenever the engineering is not an engineer’s. Where the ministry relies on work that no registered professional engineer has certified, or puts forward a non-registrant as the engineering authority on a public road, it should have to say so plainly — on the prescription, in the tender, and on the page the public reads. Section 52 (3) turns on what the public perceives. Disclosure is the only thing that fixes a perception.

Do none of it, and Rady Creek is destroyed anyway — 4.4 kilometres of public road, and every route beyond it to Silver Cup Ridge, ended on the authority of a word the regulator says belongs to no engineer of its own. And the next road will be decided the same way.

The button opens your own mail app with this already addressed. A complaint cannot be withdrawn once it is submitted. If the button does nothing, the two addresses are complaints@fpbc.ca and complaints@egbc.ca.