The Ontario government’s professional engineers are land surveyors are officially on strike.

The group’s union, the Professional Engineers Government of Ontario (PEGO), announced the news on January 16. The group represents approximately 600 professional engineers and land surveyors who support provincial infrastructure projects.

After more than a year of bargaining with its counterparts in the province’s treasury board, PEGO initiated a work-to-rule campaign in October. The union later expanded its job action by rotating withdrawals of service by key engineers and surveyors from some of Ontario's highest priority infrastructure projects.

Now, as new groups of professional engineers withdraw on a rotating basis, PEGO says the delivery of important transportation projects are being delayed across the province, in some cases by several years.

Examples of delayed projects include:

• highway interchange reconstruction on 400 series highways across Ontario
• major rehabilitation and expansion projects such as highway widening and bridge replacements
• electric vehicle charging stations across northern Ontario
• property acquisition for construction of major infrastructure projects
• environmental permitting for major industrial facilities and remediation of contaminated sites and brownfield properties

The union says that major provincial government initiatives described by the government as "full steam ahead", such as Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, will be impacted by PEGO's withdrawal of select project teams.

"Our focus has always been to address the root cause of Ontario's recruitment and retention challenges for professional engineers and land surveyors,” said PEGO President Nihar Bhatt. “PEGO members earn much less than the wider market for professional engineers and land surveyors in Ontario. This means that the expertise needed to deliver on the ambitious infrastructure agenda of the government has been short supply for far too long.”

He added that a settlement is achievable, but not before the Treasury Board shows some flexibility.