Trust, But Deregulate: The Professional Reliance Act’s Return to Faith-Based Governance
Arthur McInnis
Nov 29, 2025
By any other name, it would still smell of self-regulation.
When George Anderson tabled Bill M 216 – 2025, the Professional Reliance Act, he might have imagined himself restoring balance between experts and bureaucrats. In reality, the Bill resurrects the very model the province claimed to have buried after the 2018 Auditor General’s takedown of British Columbia’s “professional reliance” system, a polite euphemism for regulatory capture by credential.
The Bill opens with a tidy list of ten sections, from “Definitions” to “Commencement”, promising efficiency and confidence in “certified submissions.” But beneath this brevity lurks a deliberate vagueness. The Bill never defines what public interest the certification serves, who will verify the certifiers, or how disputes between profit and principle are meant to be resolved.
From Crisis to Amnesia: The Return of Professional Reliance
British Columbia’s experiment with professional reliance began as a neoliberal fantasy in the early 2000s: government would “trust the professionals” and shrink oversight. By the late 2010s this had metastasized into a system where environmental consultants hired by industry certified their own employers’ compliance. The 2018 Auditor General’s Report, The Professional Reliance Model in B.C., called it what it was, a failure of accountability, transparency, and public confidence.
That report triggered the Professional Governance Act (2018) (PGA), which was meant to consolidate and depoliticise self-regulated professions under a single oversight office. Yet Anderson’s 2025 Bill reads like a counter-revolution: a rollback dressed as reform. The very notion that professional certification could replace state verification was precisely what the PGA had sought to constrain. Bill M 216 tears those constraints off the books.
If there were lessons from the Auditor General’s scathing 2018 audit, they seem to have been forgotten. Where the PGA required regulatory bodies to act “in the public interest,” Anderson’s new statute simply assumes that public interest will somehow inhere in professional conduct itself, as though good intentions were an occupational licence. The government that once vowed never again to let foxes guard henhouses now seems intent on staffing the entire coop with them.
Section 2 – “Acceptance of Certified Submission”: Faith as Due Diligence
Section 2 states, in its entirety, that government authorities may accept a “certified submission” prepared by a qualified professional . That single clause is the bill’s quiet revolution. A “certified submission” could be anything, a soil report, a contaminated-site assessment, a building design, as long as a member of a designated profession signs it. Once certified, acceptance becomes almost mandatory: the regulator is empowered, and implicitly encouraged, to take it at face value.
This is faith masquerading as due diligence. There is no requirement for spot checks, no obligation to test the underlying data, no stipulation that the certifier be independent of the proponent. If the consultant misstates facts or interprets rules generously, the public agency has legal cover, it merely “accepted” the certified submission as the Bill allows.
Imagine a mining firm’s environmental consultant affirming that tailings ponds meet discharge standards. Under this Bill, the Ministry could deem that certification sufficient to issue or renew permits. Should contamination later occur, liability may rest not with the firm or the consultant but diffuse into the legislative ether created by section 2. This is the very loophole that the PGA’s disciplinary provisions and the Auditor General’s recommendations sought to close.
Anderson has revived it in twenty-five words.
Peer Review Without Peers
Sections 3 to 5 cover “Resolution of Dispute,” “No Limitation,” and “Peer Review.” Together, they form a neat little firewall protecting professionals from external scrutiny. The dispute mechanism is undefined. Who may bring a dispute? How is it heard? What powers does the tribunal (if any) possess? All are entirely unspecified. “No Limitation” reads like a pre-emptive strike against statutory limitation periods, suggesting that claims or reviews cannot time-bar a professional’s certification.
Then comes “Peer Review,” which sounds reassuring until one realises that it likely means review by members of the same profession whose conduct is at issue.
Peer review is a fine concept in science and academia because there are incentives for rigour and disclosure. In a regulatory context, however, it can collapse into a club of mutual forbearance. If a forest engineer’s “peer” is another consultant who shares clients and contracts, what are the odds of a damning assessment? Bill M 216 ensures such reviews occur within professional circles, not in public light.
The Professional Governance Act introduced independent oversight precisely to avoid this problem, creating a super-regulator to standardise discipline and enforcement across engineering, geoscience, forestry, and environmental professions. Anderson’s bill sidesteps that apparatus entirely, reasserting the very self-regulation that proved so porous before 2018. In effect, he has re-established professional autonomy without public accountability; the philosophical core of “professional reliance” that British Columbia once vowed never to repeat.
Liability by Exemption: How Sections 6 to 8 Rewrite Responsibility
Sections 6 through 8, “Building Codes,” “Liability of PGA Professional,” and “Protection Against Actions”, shift the Bill from philosophy to practical immunity . The inclusion of “Building Codes” is telling: the legislation invokes a domain where public safety and engineering standards are already governed by elaborate statutes and municipal bylaws. By inserting professional reliance into that framework, the Bill blurs the lines of responsibility between design professionals, municipal inspectors, and the provincial code authority.
The phrase “Liability of PGA Professional” suggests that liability is being circumscribed, not expanded. While the text of the section is concise to the point of opacity, its placement before “Protection Against Actions” hints at a legislative sequence: first limit liability, then provide explicit immunity. The pairing is a classic drafting technique for reducing exposure while appearing to clarify responsibility. Professionals become answerable to their associations and clients but insulated from broader public claims.
Consider the parallel to the former Environmental Management Act reliance regime, where consultants approved remediation plans on behalf of contaminated-site owners. When those plans failed, homeowners and neighbouring communities were left without clear recourse: the consultants had acted within their authority, and the Ministry had “accepted” their reports. Bill M 216 threatens to re-create that limbo across multiple sectors from environmental assessment to construction and resource management by re-entrenching the logic of delegated infallibility.
If one wants proof of how deeply B.C.’s political culture internalises the myth of competent self-governance, one need only read section 8: “Protection Against Actions.” The title alone announces its purpose. Here, the legislature codifies a shield for those whose expertise was meant to ensure safety in the first place. Rather than expanding accountability after the Auditor General’s findings, the province appears eager to contract it.
The Hollowing of the PGA
When the Professional Governance Act (2018) was introduced, it was sold as the cure for precisely this kind of laissez-faire deregulation. It centralised oversight, forced regulators to serve the public interest rather than their members, and created a superintendent with disciplinary authority. It was an imperfect framework, but it was rooted in a fundamental insight: self-governance without external scrutiny is a contradiction in terms.
Bill M 216 guts that philosophy. It doesn’t repeal the PGA outright; it quietly empties it of force. The Bill reintroduces parallel processes, acceptance of “certified submissions,” private peer reviews, and immunity provisions, that allow professionals to operate outside the very oversight the PGA imposed. It replaces the hard-won architecture of public accountability with a handshake culture in legislative form.
George Anderson might argue that he is simplifying procedures or “cutting red tape.” But regulation, especially of professions that shape the physical and environmental landscape of the province, exists for a reason. Simplification in this context is not neutral, it is an act of selective amnesia. It forgets why the PGA was necessary and why professional reliance became a public scandal.
The result is not modernisation but regression, a kind of bureaucratic entropy where lessons unlearned resurface as policy. If 2018 was the year British Columbia promised to rebuild public trust in professional governance, 2025 appears to be the year it decided trust was unnecessary after all.
Comparative Lessons from Alberta and Ontario
Other provinces have wrestled with the same tension between professional autonomy and public accountability. Alberta’s Professional and Occupational Associations Registration Act delegates authority to self-regulating associations but retains Ministerial powers to suspend or investigate where the public interest demands. Ontario’s Professional Engineers Act gives its regulator independence but subjects it to legislative review and judicial oversight. Both systems preserve a backstop: when professionals fail, the state re-enters the scene.
Bill M 216 provides no such safety valve. Once a “certified submission” is accepted, no statutory obligation remains to review or question it. There is no mention of Ministerial audits, no authority for the superintendent under the PGA to intervene, and no explicit recourse for the public. In this sense, B.C. is not aligning itself with Alberta or Ontario but with the least accountable aspects of the old environmental-assessment model that even industry now concedes was unsustainable.
The federal government’s environmental-assessment regimes, though frequently criticized, at least include requirements for independent review panels, consultation, and publication of findings. Anderson’s Bill borrows the terminology of professional certification but omits its safeguards. The result is a hollow proceduralism: certification replaces scrutiny, and expertise substitutes for evidence.
The Governance Mirage
Supporters of professional reliance often invoke efficiency. Why duplicate what professionals already certify? Why burden agencies with technical checks they are ill-equipped to perform? These questions sound pragmatic but conceal a deeper abdication of responsibility: government’s role is not to replicate professional expertise but to verify its use in the public interest.
Bill M 216 collapses that distinction. It invites Ministries, municipalities, and permitting bodies to offload decision-making onto professionals, then hides behind those same professionals when things go wrong. The structure is almost elegant in its cynicism: accountability is dispersed so finely that it evaporates.
The governance model implied here is neither deregulation nor proper delegation, it is what might be called diffused irresponsibility. Each actor can claim the other was responsible. The professional claims to have acted within its Code of Ethics; the regulator claims to have accepted a certified submission in good faith; the Minister claims to have respected professional independence. The public, predictably, is left with contaminated water, unsafe buildings, or depleted habitat and no clear defendant to sue.
This is not conjecture. British Columbia has lived through these failures repeatedly from Mount Polley’s tailings-dam collapse to botched site remediations in the Lower Mainland. Each time, a consultant had signed off, a Ministry had accepted it, and accountability dissolved in the fog of professional assurance. Bill M 216 codifies that fog.
The Cult of Credentialed Certainty
The Bill’s brevity, ten sections, just one page, invites the casual observer to think it merely administrative or unimportant. But concision can be camouflage. Within those few clauses lies a sweeping re-orientation of the state’s relationship to expertise. Anderson’s project is not to strengthen professionalism but to sacralise it.
This is the cult of credentialed certainty: the belief that a stamp, a seal, or a signature can substitute for oversight. It flatters professionals while diminishing the institutions that keep them honest. It converts the public servant’s duty to “verify” into a permission to “believe.”
One might almost admire the ideological purity of it. In an era when most governments speak the language of accountability, British Columbia’s legislature appears willing to say the quiet part out loud: that public protection is secondary to procedural convenience.
The irony, of course, is that this retreat is being justified in the name of trust. But trust, in public governance, is earned through verification, not granted through legislation. The Auditor General’s 2018 report warned explicitly that “reliance on professional assurances without adequate oversight can erode public confidence.” Seven years later, the province’s response is to make that reliance mandatory.
Bill M 216 is not a reform it is a relapse. It replaces the hard-won machinery of accountability with a paper-thin faith in expertise, and it does so with a straight face. The Professional Governance Act sought to ensure that professionals served the public; the Professional Reliance Act ensures the public will serve professionals.
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See also:
Index of Articles Related to BC Bill M216 – CRD Watch Homepage
New government will review “professional reliance” – Focus Magazine Sept/Oct 2017 – Focus on Victoria
CRD Watch Homepage 
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