Mr. Barry Zwicker introduced the Honorable Angus MacIsaac, elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1990, and currently the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs. He was appointed as Minister of Housing & Municipal Affairs on September 29, 1999. He served previously in the Legislature from 1969 to 1972 representing Guysborough. He also taught school in Antigonish, Guysborough, and Canso for 30 years. He is currently a self-employed woodlot owner, Christmas tree farmer, blueberry grower, and maple syrup producer. He noted the Minister was unfortunately unable to stay due to the House being in session.
Mr. MacIsaac commented it is kind of strange to hear somebody make reference to a Minister of the Crown today expressing qualities of tenderness, which he appreciated. However, the task they face is not one that is easy, but is one they accept as a challenge and are going to work very hard at living up to.
Mr. MacIsaac said his main task is to welcome all of you here on behalf of the Government of Nova Scotia. He wished to extend a warm welcome and hoped those in attendance would enjoy some of our warm hospitality. He commented it was very pleasant for him to be able to say hello to a former student of his - Paul Smith. It is very nice to come across a former student and find somebody that is involved in what must be a very challenging and exciting position for many of you.
Mr. MacIsaac commented one of the things that excited him when he first came to the department is the capacity we have with respect to our land branch. The technology that is there and the implication it has with respect to your work and tasks is one of the things he was looking forward to being involved in, not that he was going to make any changes, but becoming involved in gaining a better appreciation of work done by that branch. It has very important implications for us all. We have the capacity to begin working on the development of policy in anticipation of events as opposed to being in the situation where we are developing policies in order to react to events. To him that is one of the greatest potentials he saw with respect to that department which he has the honor to lead as its Minister. He said he was looking forward to seeing that potential put into effect and was sure it will have considerable ramifications with respect to the work you do. The theme of the conference is professionalism and education. That is an obvious fit and it would be difficult to think of one without the other.
Mr. MacIsaac stated education is more than just a couple of years of school and a diploma on the wall. It must be continuous. No one would want to go to a doctor who has not kept abreast of the latest advances in medicine. The same is true for planners, hence, he hoped to have an opportunity at this conference not only to discuss the future direction of planning schools but also educational options for those who have been in the profession for awhile.
Mr. MacIsaac commented the divergent views of planning are related to professionalism and education. It should reach out to those who are not familiar with the benefits of a well planned community. Many people see planning as only regulation and zoning, however, you know it is and should be much more than that. The planning profession as a whole should work to promote the
value of planning. The profession should actively show and explain its importance in making its communities better places to live and good places to invest and create economic opportunity for all.
Mr. MacIsaac indicated he would like to have the opportunity to stay and hear the opening speakers, however, as indicated, they have responsibilities at the House of Assembly and he needed to go there and face a different kind of speaker - the Speaker of the House of Assembly.
Mr. MacIsaac commented he looked forward in particular to exploring the potential for technology available in our department and seeing the applications for not only planning but what is very important for government. He looked forward to seeing the application that exists with respect to the development of policy and enabling us to perhaps get to a point where we can be ahead of the game or be leaders in terms of developing policy.
Mr. MacIsaac wished the group well at their conference, thanked them for the opportunity of welcoming the group here today, and looked forward to seeing some of them in the future.
Mr. Zwicker commented he could remember his first API conference he attended at the Holiday Inn in Halifax. There were 145 people at the dinner, the place was crowded, and they had welcoming remarks from the Minister. It was one of the best conferences he ever attended and was one of the times he could look back and say he remembered 60-70% of the stuff presented because of the impact. He thought the presentations were good and on topic; they were topics for the day. The sessions for the next two days fall into that category. It is a conference dealing with education and professionalism, which is timely to say the least. We have three schools in the Province educating people coming directly into the planning field. Also, the Minister's comment about continuing education is well on the mark. We go through formal education and go out to work. It is very critical to stay current.
Mr. Zwicker advised they have two people to kick-off the session. The two have interesting and varied backgrounds in planning. Mary Bishop, he has known for a long time. She worked for the government in Newfoundland and is now a senior associate with Canning & Pitt Associates in St. John's, Newfoundland. Her background is in the public and private sector. Mary will talk about professionalism. Derrick Davis is the former Chief Curator of the Museum of Natural History. He is also an educator and has been an instructor at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design for 20 years and stays involved with community organizations such as the Ecology Action Centre.
Ms. Mary Bishop thanked the group for inviting her to help introductions to this years conference. When Mike Polten first called her back in the summer she asked him why. The answer was they wanted someone who could really stir up the audience. Over the next couple of days, they will be discussing, debating, and formulating their collective opinions about the merits and needs of legislation which will recognize the specialized expertise needs of planners. The Nova ScotiaChapter of API is the first of four provincial chapters to pursue legislation. The other three provincial chapters are also considering proposing similar legislation. It is a very timely topic and across the counter other provinces do have professional practice legislation.
Ms. Bishop said she wanted to raise some questions they might want to debate. It can take essentially two forms or some combination. First, being legislation giving legitimacy to the professional name, ie., professional planner, engineer, land surveyor. The other one is legislation that sets out the scope or definition of the work professionals are qualified to do. In the case of legislation proposed for Nova Scotia, the name professional planner would be protected and goes a bit further and actually specifies the scope of practices that would be associated with the term "professional planner". It would provide assurances that professionals hired as either planners or consultants are qualified. This is the direction we are headed. Over the next couple of days we will ask ourselves if this is the right direction. She referred to work done by Nancy Marshall who talks about the origins of professions, which occurred during the industrial revolution. Professional organizations were important for the sharing of information or determining who would get into the club. The difficulty of distinguishing who was a honorable versus dishonorable member of the profession lead to the development and introduction of a code of ethics. As the profession evolved, the role eventually began to shift from sharing information.
Ms. Bishop indicated in Newfoundland, after hundreds of years, the honorable profession of fishing has now been formed as a professional association. Although not recognized in legislation, the presence of this professional association will eventually lead to the allocation of fishing licenses. Membership in that profession will give these people a certain status for the purpose of their livelihood. One of the things we want to think about is what distinguishes the profession. Knowledge acquired is probably the most obvious distinguishing element. She believed planners through educational training do have a broad range of skills.
Ms. Bishop indicated she has worked in the traditional narrow field but others have provided her with very rewarding work over the years since she graduated from planning school. She believed there is a narrow scope of intellectual knowledge and expertise which we can call our own, that being the core component of a recognized planning degree which is currently required for members in CIP. Her experience was primarily related to statutorial planning. Outside of that there are other things we get but what we could call our own is fairly well defined. For example, the process by which we prepare plans might not necessarily be our exclusive domain. Whether or not this combination of education and experience is producing a planner with this expertise is a matter for further discussion in more detail tomorrow. As we travel down the road to establishing our profession as being legitimate, what questions should we be asking ourselves? She would like the group to debate the issue of protecting planning practices which has to be fairly narrowly defined when the need is to broaden the scope of planning. Also, would being a registered professional planner make any difference to the job being done by planners now? Also, would it matter to the planners or your employer or your client? Also, is the quality of our work and principles upon which we base our practice sufficient to garner that support? If your work in the private sector is not up to snuff, you are soon out of work. As members of a professional organization, are there additional responsibilities they will have to take on as a result of this planning legislation? As individualpractitioners, she felt there is going to be a greater onus on them to develop ongoing professional development. This is something we should be doing anyway but as we become registered or licensed planners, there is that incentive to allow us to continue with ongoing professional development. For professional organizations, there is also going to be an additional burden for financing. For our planning schools, there will be more pressure to ensure that graduates have greater competence in planning practices. She urged the group to consider their relationship with other groups that they work with on a daily basis. How would they be effected by our efforts to define who should and should not be permitted to do planning work? What are your expectations from this professional association and what will you expect to see? There will be some additional financial costs. She wished the group the best of luck in its deliberations over the next couple of days.
Mr. Derrick Davis said he participated in a lot of community activities and planning sessions. This past weekend he was at an ecology workshop and it was very interesting to see the experiences of fishermen and the demand for the kind of services which professional planners should be providing. There was not a strong planner presence. There were civil servants and very little stated opinion. It is a very difficult environment for professional planners within any level of government to actually exercise the kinds of things that should be expected of a professional planner. When you're a consultant, you have a client to deal with and you're a bit freer.
Mr. Davis stated he was not a professional planner, never set out to be one, and was not qualified as one. However, there were opportunities for him to participate so long as there was not the strict requirement to be a licensed planner. He said he could contribute to planning without necessarily being a planner. It is very unusual in many ways to find a museum curator active in planning. The opportunities come from two sources. First, they developed in Nova Scotia an extra good resource of information and material related to the natural history of the Province. Legislation for parks and protected areas and special places became a legislated land use function. Eventually he was asked to teach the ecology course at NSCAD which he did for a number of years and did some studio work. The most exciting thing was getting to know the students, particularly at the studio level because they are always looking for projects. It was kind of fun to go through government work and museum work that we couldn't get around to doing, so when students came looking for a project he could say they have this and that to choose from. As a result of that, we got some nice work done for free but was also able to provide his colleagues with some one on one education. We would hope that students doing land use study would come away with a better knowledge of heritage resources, etc. At the same time, the government said there are too many professional civil servants. Many people are carrying large levels of responsibility so when they come to land use issues, it was trying to pull from the civil servants the people with expertise. The Department of Education was in those days an owner or holder of land. The line departments would manage lands. The opportunity existed to participate and provide resources without carrying any responsibility
Mr. Davis indicated some people coming out of school are excellent people and others are totally unprepared. It was his experience the graduates coming out of an intensive program are not prepared for the workplace unless they had some kind of university degree. The person with a universitydegree in any type of field has a lot more experience whereas somebody out from high school will not have that advanced standing in things. In the class, there was a real disparity between the different levels. It was difficult to organize material to present for an undergraduate taking it as a graduate program. What we need to do is analyze those programs. Within the planning profession there is a group of people who are technical and really know how to use GIS and licensing and permits and regulations. If you are working with an existing set of rules, then really all you do on a day to day basis is technical work. Separate from that there is a group of people that are more academic in nature. The administrator who you're working under in the planning department may not necessarily be a planner. There should also be an opportunity for the person who I would call technical at the technician level to advance through the program to become the chief of a department - someone who has had hands on experience. Does the educational process provide those opportunities for people to decide which direction they would like to go into?
Mr. Davis indicated the term "life long learning" was used and is a thing for the Department of Education of Nova Scotia. People want to be able to progress through life - they want to advance their knowledge and their experience, to get a better job, and see some career advancement. Do we provide in planning professions those kinds of opportunities? If somebody decides to take off time from their regular work and go out and get a masters degree, are they penalized for that? We want employers to be very interested in professional development and therefore the educational system has to respond to that. I also looked into the idea that you could identify these people. A student entering the program of planning education being experienced has to be identifiable as serving certain functions. I think education generally - this applies to planning quite well, has three real functions. It has to address the needs of society. Secondly, there's the need of the student themselves. They looked at the program which they feel is important, worthwhile, and meets their own needs. Their own needs relate to a personal fulfillment in some cases and we hope that would be prime in their mind and not just will we get a good job out of this. Personal fulfillment from education, but also recognizing the reality if the student is also looking for a quality of education which will be some sort of fulfilling career. And then, I found going through the draft of the Professional Planners Act, there's obviously a strong relationship between educational planners and the requirements of a profession. I've put that third on the list. The needs of the society first, the needs of the student second, and the needs of the planning profession third. A profession is, as mentioned previously, requires a constant inflow of skilled people.
When we started at NSCAD, a great exercise was drawing maps and the maps developed in the studio are of incredible colours and designs and layouts. It was an art presentation. But now of course everyone wants to go to COGS and learn how to do GIS and nobody knows how to sharpen a pencil any more. I think there's something lost but relying on the computer to do all these good things may be a bad move. Working on this type of approach, we need to meet these necessary concerns and look at the way programs are being developed in planning. I'm particularly familiar with the NSCAD program. The origins of that stuff comes from what I was familiar with in Britain and was called town and country planning. If you had a degree in geography, you were ready for town and country planning. All this stuff which I encounter in planning, and the landscape is extremely interesting as a result of that. Things took a change of course with the COGS design in nature. That's where the origin of NSCAD comes from. It would be very difficult with all yourtechnical knowledge and all your geographic information systems to come up with something which is really good, appropriate, without an element of some sort of design involved in that process. We are saying to our students, look at all this stuff, we want you to be a geographer, a geologist, a hydrologist, all kinds of things, a bit of a mathematician, be able to write properly, give a good public lecture, communicate, all of these things, and by the way we want you to be a designer, a GIS technologist, all of this stuff, and for that we'll give you this degree which is maybe not of much value but it's a bit of a raw deal so you wonder why students get discouraged in the middle.
The interesting thing a few years back was the introduction of what's called landscape ecology and it was interesting. Everyday we had a presentation there on the wall. It's where you turn this landscape function into a form that is compatible with science, so science in the early days was geography. Then design comes in and now science is coming back to make all this stuff accurate and measurable. We've done some exercises in landscape ecology and it's really exciting stuff but I wonder when we get to the reality of the office. The first day at work could be anything in that whole spectrum of activity. So it's very difficult for a student to say okay I'm going to study and apply the principles of landscaping ecology to the Town of Bedford.
What I think we have to do is simply look at things in a context of landscape function. We are saying everything counts here and everything has to be incorporated into the model. Now this is impossible for an individual to do on the basis of expertise they gained at a college in a four year undergraduate program. There are elements in there which are critical. One is to have a very broad understanding of the world - the way things work - people's aspiration - the way nature functions. We have enough information to do that. Also, some really good training in communication. The ability to be able to know what the messages are and the ability to discuss those. That is particularly true when planners doing projects have to go to a local community hall and talk to the people in the community about the plans and what their aspirations are, and how they can be dealt with. Communication through many media is a very important aspect of that. Students should be trained to handle that. At NSCAD, the real gem was the studio program. In the studio was really where the stuff took place - where people had some knowledge, applied it, discussed it, and presented it in many ways, often working for clients. It's the process which is the most important and in that case more the information content. What we ended up with was a student who could be a generalist. The challenge for a student is to have a general knowledge to be a good communicator but also develop a specialty. This is where the modification of the old expression "jack of all trades - master of nine" could be applied. What we have here is a "jack of all trades and master of one" so a student has to say okay I've got a good background in planning, I can communicate well, but there's one thing I'm really good at. If they can achieve that, I think they are doing quite well. The identification of the speciality is a chance for post-graduate education which will lead to higher degrees and perhaps some professional advancement.
For those who think ecology is a great place to work and they'd like to be in the academic world, being an instructor in planning at some point, by having the master's degree you may be going onto a PhD but allow them to fit into this rather small minded academic group at Dalhousie - we don't know how to teach but you get your PhD so we'll let you teach to 500 students at a time. That's a reality of academic life. So you've got the student coming out with this able to do the job, able todo something special, really take to diverse audiences, with the opportunity to move forward to advance their career in some way. It has to be dynamic. For a school to provide post-graduate work in planning related fields, you need to have a very well informed, competent faculty. We need to have a really good body of faculty members who are worldly in their vision and experience and professional work but also good instructors to let you drive this thing forward. It has to be pulled together into something which is much more dynamic. The advantage of expanding and having institutions well established and not worrying about continuity from one year to the other means you can have a system where people come from many places to take the program. Students will feel much better in an environment like that than wondering if a program will continue next year which is the situation we had in some instances. From that type of development you end up with a dynamic which is a healthy thing to have and that's what my view in the educational field should be pursued -not just leaving things as they are but wanting to tinker with it and coming up with a plan and developing it into something dynamic.
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