The Ontario Engineering Competition was originally created by Diane Neil from Queen's University in 1980. It was called the Ontario Engineering Design Competition (OEDC) and had only three categories to compete in: the Open Competition, the Industrial Competition and the Communications Competition.The Competition was to continue this way until 1991, when the Sandford Fleming foundation approached the OEDC board and proposed to join their debates with the competition, as they were unhappy with the attendance at their competition. Thus, the University of Waterloo added yet another communications division called Extemporaneous Communications (later renamed Parliamentary Debate).In 1992 the entire competition was renamed to its present name, the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) by the competition committee for the University of Ottawa. This new title was to show that the "competition and engineering in general, is more than just design". In addition to the new name, they made the name bilingual to show that we are a bilingual country.The sixth and final category was added to the competition in 1997 by the organizing committee from McMaster University. Now the competition has six categories: Junior Design. Senior Design, Parliamentary Debate, Engineering Communications, Innovative Design and Consulting Engineering