Annette Bergeron, P.Eng., MBA, FEC

TOP 25 WOI Annette Bergeron

Women of Influence (Canada)  online

2014-01-08

The CEO of Women of Influence interviews Top 25 Annette Bergeron.

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Forging Her Own Career Path

Queen's Alumni Review  print

In her Grade 13 yearbook, Annette Bergeron, Sc’87, wrote that her career dream was to lead a large engineering organization. That was almost 30 years ago, and Annette has ­accomplished that goal – twice – and a lot more besides.

These days the former Queen’s business and engineering lecturer and Alma Mater ­Society (AMS) general manager is finishing a one-year term as president of the Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO), the body that regulates and ­licenses the province’s 76,000 professional ­engineers. She was voted in as president-elect in 2011, served in that capacity in 2012, and stepped into the president’s role for 2013. She’s the sixth woman in the organization’s 91-year history to hold the voluntary position.

That means a lot to Annette, who is ­constantly encouraging women to enter and assume leadership positions in the male-dominated profession.

“You have to make engineering attractive to women,” she says. “To do that, you have to demonstrate how engineering impacts society, because people really don’t have a good sense of what engineers do. They see doctors and lawyers on TV, but engineers are off in some corner, building bridges. But we do tissue ­engineering, we do biomedical engineering. We bring safe water to cities and towns. There are all kinds of aspects of engineering beyond building bridges.”

Vying for the PEO gig was a logical move for Annette, who previously served, twice, as the president of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, which advocates for, and provides various services to, the province’s engineers.

Annette’s duties as PEO president included advocating for a repeal of a section in the ­Professional Engineers Act that exempted industrial manufacturers from the requirement to have a professional engineer on site to oversee the design and installation of large equipment in workplaces. The PEO has argued that the industrial exemption, in effect in Ontario since 1984, jeopardized workers’ safety.

The other big-ticket item on her agenda was speaking on behalf of the PEO at the investigation into the June 2012 collapse of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliott Lake, Ontario, in which two people died. The investigator’s ­final report is due to be released in October.

For her work at the helm of PEO, last year Annette was named one of Canada’s Top 25 Women of Influence by a Toronto-based ­organization dedicated to the professional ­advancement of women. Each year the group honours the country’s top female leaders in..."

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Is Ontario Putting Business First, Safety Second?

TVO The Agenda  online

2013-10-11

Annette Bergeron, president of Professional Engineers Ontario, sits down with Steve Paikin to discuss the Wynne government's decision to scrap a policy that could affect worker safety in Ontario.
Earlier this summer, the Ontario government decided to scrap a repeal of section 12(3)(a) of the Professional Engineers Act, also known as the industrial exception. This section allowed some engineering work on machinery or equipment to be carried out by employees without an engineering license.

Ontario is the only province in Canada to have this exception, making us, well, exceptional.

The decision to leave the exception intact was applauded by some business groups, such as the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, who argued the repeal would have placed a heavy burden on businesses through increased regulation, costs and production delays.

However, Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), which is to engineers what the Law Society of Upper Canada is to lawyers, has been lobbying the government to repeal the industrial exception, arguing it's an important matter of workplace health and safety.

We invited PEO's president Annette Bergeron to flesh out the issue.

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