I'm in Alberta, Canada and my understanding is "Engineer" is a protected title here. My team was made up of some programmers who had actual engineering degrees, who had Software Engineer as their job title. They wore the ring and everything. The rest of us were "Software Developers", which is honestly really fine with me
We wound up merging with a company based in the USA, including merging with their software team. Of course all of their programmers were "Software Engineers" but none had actual engineering certification.
I brought this up with the department head at one point. I was concerned that the new programmers with Engineer titles would be given more weight compared to those of us with Developer titles, despite not actually having any additional credential over us. I was assured that would not be the case. In fact he acted appalled that I would even suggest something like that. After all it's just a title and of course everyone is too smart to get blinded by job titles
Anyways you can probably guess how it wound up playing out in reality
Job title worship is a real thing