Professional Reliance in the Natural Resources

The Professional Governance Act (PGA) was introduced and received Royal Assent in fall 2018. The PGA strengthens governance of professionals who work in B.C.’s natural resource sector and in other sectors.

The PGA was developed in response to the first two recommendations from the independent final report on the professional reliance review in B.C. by Mark Haddock in June 2018.

The report contains 121 recommendations:

• recommendations #1 and #2 address professional governance
• recommendations #3 to #34 address improvements to laws, regulations and authorizations
• the remaining 87 recommendations focus on specific regulatory regimes in the natural resource sector

The PGA legislates reforms for professional governance in B.C. and institutes best practices for the professional regulators to ensure professionals are held to the highest technical and ethical standards. The recently established Office of the Superintendent of Professional Governance (Office), located in the Ministry of Attorney General, is responsible for implementation and administration of the PGA, including oversight of professional regulators to ensure they are governing their respective professions in the public interest. See the news release on the Office for more information.

Government continues to consider and develop appropriate actions to respond to the remaining recommendations in the report and is acting on many of them as part of its broader goals and mandate commitments for natural resource management. This includes strengthening results-based laws; building government capacity for compliance and enforcement; and modernizing land-use planning.