Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering" degree?
Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering" degree?
That said, it is a heuristic for determining who's smart. You just have to realize that it's a very imperfect tool.
We don't have the ridiculousness of sanitation engineer and the like so if the job posting includes engineer in the title you can easily assume they expect a degree and a licence with a proper Canadian accreditation board.
And in case you were wondering, software engineering is only slightly different in that the majority of software engineers don't keep up their accreditation licence so usually when you see a Canadian software engineering posting they're looking for the degree but not necessarily the licence and will often accept non-engineers with a comp sci degree. It's rare that if the posting asks for software engineer that they'll accept someone without a degree. (Those positions are usually titled programmer, developer or programmer/analyst (which is the title you typically get from a CEGEP (kind of like community college in the US) degree.))