ABSTRACT
The history of the engineering profession in Canada is very closely tied in with the history of the country, as transportation projects in the form of railways and canals provided vital links between disparate pockets of population across the vast territories which by the mid-nineteenth century had come together to form a confederation. The status of Canadian engineers is reinforced through licensing, a symbol of occupational control which British engineers, with the exception of very limited aspects of civil engineering, have never achieved. Although the engineering profession is organized provincially in Canada, since 1936 there has been a Canadian Council of Professional Engineers, which is a federation of the provincial and territorial authorities that license engineers. The companies studied were in a range of Canadian industries employing engineers including telecommunications, automotives, electrical, computing, adhesives, chemicals and food processing.
