"examine the feasibility of establishing an engineering program at UNBC appropriate for the North"

Hmmmmm ... I can see the "wood first" policy being changed to a "snow and ice first" policy.

This is not the North. Whitehorse and Yellowknife are the North. Prince George is no different than Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and a ton of other cities that have universities with engineering schools.

So, first order of business, get to know your geography.

It would be much more appropriate to establish an engineering school that is appropriate for remote rural areas that deal with

1. civil engineering design of infrastructure that supports small, remote communities

2. communications engineering

3. mining engineering

4. tertiary manufacturing process engineering

5. forest engineering

One has to wonder how much of a disservice we actually do to ourselves by constantly throwing those "north" and "northern" monikers around?

From the point of view of trying to market the city, my hunch is that referring to us as the "north" is actually harmful and not helpful. It implies so many things that are misleading or downright untrue.

Gus. If Prince George politicians did not consistantly refer to the City as BC's Northern Capital, and if we had named the University something other than the University of Northern British Columbia, or refer to Highway 97 as 97 North maybe we would not have this problem.

Seems to me that since Campbell announced the 15% decrease in income tax, he effectively took away any money this Select Committee was going to use for its recommendations. So unless they undo Campbells damage, they are dead in the water. Beating a dead horse you might say.

When I moved to PG in 1973, this was called the Central Interior. They were very descriptive words of where PG is actually located.

I think we should take back our proper geography based descriptor and assign BC's Northern Capital name to a city of the North's choice.

I agree with you NMG and Palopu about the value, or lack thereof of referring to us as northern. Yes, it is north of the GVRD, but so is most of the province at latitudes north of the GVRD.

Adding engineering seems like a good idea in view both of our economy and of the strong demand that there has been at UNBC for science and technology. Indeed, it is strange that engineering wasn't there from the begining. One explanation I heard back then was that the established universities were opposed. The other was that it was due to the administration's anti-science bias.

During the term of Poff as UNBC VP the environmental engineering program was established. UNBC later received funding from BC to create additional engineering programs and several professors with engineering degrees (non-environmental) were hired by Poff, but none of the engineering programs that they proposed was supported by the successors of Poff and I suspect the majority of the fund
was spent on construction of a DTO building.

A majority of these non-env. engineering profs left UNBC during the controversial buyout package of Cozzetto/Brunt(2007-08).

As I wrote before, there is no reference to technology in 2010 UNBC strategic plan.
UNBC needs to update both its strategic plan and its strategic research plan with explicit reference to an item for engineering and technology (besides environmental | Community Dev. | Health | first nations). The current draft of UNBC research plan[url]http://www.unbc.ca/assets/research/unbc_strategic_research_plan_2010.pdf
[/url] is still weak in tech/engineering.

In reply to billposer, I should add that ENR (Environmental and Natural Resources) for (soil | air | water) issues have been the major focus of UNBC over the past decade and unlike their predecessors, the research areas of UNBC's president, Iwama, and provost (Mark Dale) are on issues related ENR.

The majority of past UNBC FA presidents were from ENR and "all the research chairs" hired in UNBC have at least one focus area on ENR (see Table 2 in research plan link in my previous post).

One can conclude that Environmental programs have gradually dominated the ecosystem of UNBC and in some cases this progress has come at the expense of other engineering programs and research areas and unfortunately at the expense of UNBC enrolment.