We exist. I'm a Canadian P.Eng. (Software). I got my experience working on software for controlling unmanned vehicles, and I know a few dozen other Software P.Engs.

Requiring some amount of local experience makes sense, as a major part of engineering is ensuring your project abides by all local laws that govern what you're doing. Getting the required work experience under the supervision of another engineer is a lot rarer than in other disciplines, but on the bright side, that P.Eng. title is required a lot less often than in other disciplines.

With that being said, it certainly is difficult for foreign engineers to get their degrees recognized. If any improvement is to be made on that front, the government almost certainly will need to prod the engineering associations into doing a better job of evaluating foreign credentials.

There are possible career benefits, though they're not huge. The company I left was just starting to require a software engineer on every team to sign off on each release. And, my father convinced me to do the paperwork for the P.Eng. with a story of a raise he missed out on due to not bothering with the P.Eng. despite holding an engineering degree.

Getting one generally requires at least one existing PE who can vouch for the quality of your work which creates a chicken and egg problem if there are no PEs where you work.

Thanks very much, there is hope!

(And thanks to all the other replies too!)

Furthurmore, there are 1316 Computer Engineers. These are not huge numbers, but it is wrong to say that there is no such thing as software engineering in Canada.

Looking at it now, it seems they've dropped that 3 CS course requirement (at the time it was the same first 3 courses as CS majors) and replaced it with 1 required CS course: Computing for Engineers. Everything else, required, is ECE (electrical and computer engineering) with options to satisfy some major electives via CS courses (up to 7 by the hours, but no specific sequence, required to be 3xxx or above meaning a student would need to take at least 2 or 3, depending on present CS curriculum, to even qualify for them with prerequisites).

I picked this one as it seems like the quintessential CMPE program from what I've seen, and it's one of the top engineering schools in the US so it ends up influencing or setting the standard by which other US schools do things. And specifically, it's not halfway. It's often (from a perusal of other schools I'm familiar with) heavily biased towards the hardware side (by requirements, electives of course permit the student some leeway for individual breadth).

EDIT: I did misread the current GT requirements, seems they moved 2 of the programming courses into the ECE department and out of CS.

Also worth noting, professional registrations may not line up exactly with degrees. You don't necessarily need a degree in computer engineering to be a computer engineer. The board would likely find a degree in electrical engineering and a few years of relevant work experience to be sufficient. (Though, this may vary by jurisdiction.)

One thing that is especially hilarious is the interview process: the equivalent of the software world's interview process would be to grill an engineer by requiring him to, say, solve a projectile motion with air-resistance problem (fairly common in first-year calculus-based mechanics classes and as review in sophomore/junior year classical mechanics) on the whiteboard and using that as a way to gauge his ability to design whole systems. These interview processes aren't good at looking for engineers, they're good at looking for code monkeys with a high opinion of themselves.

That's my underlying feeling as well. Software Engineering seems like a futuristic discipline, like being a Nanobot Technologist. We're just not there yet - why bother pretending?

The line's blurry, except for places where the law gives a sharper distinction.