Human Resources Committee on March 25th, 2014

[Heather Kennedy]

I think Fort McMurray is in a unique position, and Suncor isn't alone in our values around addressing the needs of the local aboriginal communities, so we do benefit from that broader perspective. It also creates a challenge in that it can be very competitive. Any company would be here in front of you wanting to discuss some similar goals around making sure they optimize aboriginal employment and that type of thing.

We certainly feel we've had a strong employment history. We've had some very targeted programs over the years to keep that population up. Where I think it's changing now is as we look at our business going forward whether it's at Fort Hills in the mine development or in situ, it really does require some level of post-secondary education. We think the next tranche of very successful employees and contributors is going to come from those aboriginal people who are now taking engineering degrees or technology degrees or getting their 4th class steam ticket.

A lot of our support that we wouldn't have spoken about today is for those institutions and for providing support for those students who want to get their 4th class steam ticket and then get hired at our in situ operation or something along those lines. As our business gets more technical and more complicated, we want that workforce to reflect that, so we now support programs that we might not have 10 or 15 years ago. Athabasca University runs a brilliant program called learning communities that is working—particularly in the Wabasca area right now, but also in northern Alberta with communities—to provide distance post-secondary education. That's a great program that we're considering how to be part of. There's Sunchild e-learning where you can, in a remote community, learn right there in your community and then get ready to go to Keyano College, for example, for a power engineering ticket.

That's where we think the next level is, and that allows us to—back to our first question—then start to have more diversity in the professional ranks and the management ranks, which is one of our goals as well. So it is shifting for sure.

[Mary-Pat Campbell]

To add to that, I think exactly what Noront also touched on is a real focus on the youth. Branching into the high school and to partnerships that are helping to support the youth so they can envision a future in engineering or any of those disciplines as well, partnerships with Indspire, Actua, some of those large institutions that support youth and their learning is a key strategy going forward.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

And the specifics on the ASETS program?

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

We're over the—

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

I threw that out early, you know, Mr. Chair, so....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

The committee is looking forward to hearing that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

I know you're trying to get in there like an earwig, but....

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

If he hadn't talked for three minutes at the beginning, he'd have had time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

We'll go to our next questioner, and that's Mr. Carmichael.

[John Carmichael, Conservative, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our guests today.

Ms. Campbell, you started to go into an area that I was going to bridge into, and that is the perspective of education. You talked about high school recruiting, you talked about Athabaska, and about some of the programs that bring young people along and encourage them, motivate them, to develop a skill to follow a trade in your industry.

I wonder if you could speak briefly about what you're doing in high school or within the curriculum process to draw young people from K to 12, let's say, but high school into a college education and ultimately into a trade with you.

[Mary-Pat Campbell]

I think Heather could probably better speak to some of the programs, such as Careers and RAP, that we're involved in as well.

[Heather Kennedy]

Mary-Pat referenced a couple of specific programs. One program that's been very successful in Fort McMurray is RAP, which is the registered apprenticeship program. It's designed for students who get to high school and really find that the traditional academic stream is not for them. They actually come out of grade 12 with their first year of apprenticeship completed and a grade 12 education. They're set up with an employer to then move on to continue their apprenticeship. As with most programs, that is likely not to be directly with Suncor but with a company that supports Suncor.

So that's one program. Another is Careers: the Next Generation. I think that's a very important program in the high schools, which works very hard in Alberta, in northern Alberta particularly, to take kids and get them in the trades. It works with the schools. We're a very strong supporter of that.

One of the interesting things that we find we have to do most in the high schools is actually interest kids in our industry. For some reason, it's not generally the industry of choice for a lot of young Canadians. Indspire particularly has some very good rap—this time I mean the music rap—videos that attract kids to actually start to learn more about mining. I think Noront particularly referred to a program they have as well.

I would say half of it is about educating kids about the opportunities in our industry, because they are unaware of them. The other half is specific programs targeted to getting their foot into the trades program at the same time they're doing their high school education. At our site in Fort McMurray, we'll have high school students doing their apprenticeship sections. They're very carefully supervised, of course, with safety being our primary concern.

Those are two of the key programs that we participate in.

[John Carmichael, Conservative, Don Valley West, ON]

Good. Thank you. I'll come back to you in a minute on your aboriginal skills and employment training, if we have time to chat a bit more about that.

To Mr. Semple, you talked about excellence in aboriginal inclusion. Specifically when you talked about the Ring of Fire training alliance, I found that very interesting, the partnership you have created there.

Ms. Hall, you talked about some of the early recruitment success you've had. I wonder if you could just speak to us a little bit about how you go about the recruitment, your early learning on the successes you've had with an 83% graduation rate, and how long you've been at it. I know you're a new company, but maybe you can give us some of your early learning on some of the results.

[Leanne Hall]

Fantastic. When we looked at trying to do an integrated alliance type of partnership, we first looked at best practices from around the world and within Canada as far as aboriginal employment engagement was concerned. We were able to look at very good learnings from other organizations, other communities, and other educational partners that have walked in our shoes before. We took that time to develop best practices. We just received the funding. We have a short 15-month delivery, so it's a lot of pressure to deliver the type of training and the amount of training that we're doing in the communities. When we went to the communities and we told them we had these opportunities for them, they've been waiting for three years for these opportunities so they came in waves.

The first program that we required everyone to go through was the mining essentials program. It was created in partnership with the Assembly of First Nations and the Mining Industry Human Resources Council. It's an absolutely tremendous program. It gives an overview of the industry. It gives them a lot of life skills and essential skills. This is where we've graduated the 160 candidates so far from. Now they have a great overview of the industry. They're committed to going to training on a daily basis. They have those skills. And now they can pick the skills training avenues that they would like to proceed in.

Noront believes in the test of workplace essential skills. Unlike other companies, in looking at the challenges we had with education—the majority of our communities are fly-in, fly-out communities with no high school located within the community—we had to look at how we could get people engaged, to be interested in training, how we could stay with them so that they could go to school or work. We've developed our models so that they can benefit by doing any of those types of training. But one of the key things is that we are not going to be requiring a grade 12 minimum education in order to get started in the process. We have to have an opportunity over the next 10 years to develop people's skills and talents. And so one of the small initiatives that we started early on was at the grade 11 level. It was looking at doing 110 hours of mining-specific curriculum. Kids had an opportunity at grade 11 to have specific training in mining.

I'm thinking back to three years at this already. We've done a lot of early engagement, and because of that, we've raised the interest in working in the mining sector. And this is why we're having the tremendous uptake on the aboriginal training alliance today. Again, the time pressure of the amount of training that we need to do in this short time period is enormous, but the community members are completely engaged and thrilled to be involved.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Now on to Monsieur Brahmi for our last round of questions.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will ask the representatives from Suncor Energy my questions in French, but I would also like to hear what our witness from Toronto has to say.

You have described four areas of development. I am interested in the second area, that is developing skills and recruiting people in a way that respects aboriginal culture. I am particularly concerned about failure in school. That has to do with young people in general, but it also affects employers.

We have heard a lot about this issue; you are not the first ones to talk about it. You talked about the essential skills that young people must have when they enter the labour market. Do young aboriginal people face specific obstacles compared to young people who come out of high school and whom you are trying to recruit?

[Heather Kennedy]

In terms of some of the specific barriers we have experienced in the programs we've dealt with, I think the first would be, as you mentioned in your question, not having a grade 12 education, not completing the curriculum.

The second would be that for the schools in some of the more remote communities, their equivalency is lower than we would expect. As a company we're very excited about the new first nation education act that's coming, and we look forward to figuring out how to partner with our local first nations. But we think another area is getting that equivalency, so that when you have a grade 12 diploma from any school, whether it's a remote school or a first nations school or a school in downtown Toronto, it's similar.

Another barrier is a simple thing like a driver's licence. If you live in Fort Chipewyan, you don't need one. You come down to Fort McMurray, and you don't have one. How do you get a driver's licence? If you've not had a chequing account or a bank account previously, that's another specific barrier for people coming from remote communities.

The last one is that not all of them even have cell coverage. We have them come to Fort McMurray for the first time and have to experience that BlackBerry device that none of the rest of us can live without.

Those are some of the specific challenges we've experienced that we think are important to work on with the community to overcome.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

I would like to ask our witnesses from Toronto whether they have to face the fact that the number of high school graduates varies depending on the school and the region they come from. Those who did their high school studies in an aboriginal community have a harder time entering the labour market than those who graduated high school in downtown Toronto. As a result, aboriginal communities have even more significant obstacles to overcome because their high school level has not been adapted to the situation.

Do you have to deal with that problem?

[Paul Semple]

Yes we do. I think it even goes back further than that. We're talking about very remote fly-in communities in isolated parts of northwestern Ontario. Not all of them have high schools, so they have children who are graduating into grade 8 and grade 9, and they have to go to school in Thunder Bay or somewhere else away from their families. It becomes a reluctance. I think in some of our communities the high school graduation rate is around 55% or 50%.

One of the challenges we've done is that we go further down the chain and try to engage the youth at a very young age to give them a reason to identify that they need to stay in school to get the education they need to create careers for themselves. We do that in mining programs. We do that in arts programs. We do that in whatever way we think can help the youth stay in school.

for example, we had a summer camp after one of our mining programs. The principal told us in September, “We don't know what's going on, but last year, on a normal day in October we would have five kids in our classes. This year we have 52.”

So it's to get the message out that there are career opportunities and opportunities for those who want to put in the work and effort to become educated and become trained. There are opportunities there. We have to get that message in at a very young age in these communities. That's really one of our focuses. Hopefully we will get them to a point where we increase the high school graduation rates.

Also, specific to your question, the equivalency is definitely a problem. So we're getting this from all angles, equivalency plus graduation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you very much.

That ends our questioning for today.

I would just wrap it up with a few closing comments.

What we've heard today is very encouraging in the sense that the corporate responsibility side of the equation is first and foremost with many of your operations. We appreciate that.

The other thing I would highlight is the projection of one of our witnesses from the first panel, who said there would be 400,000 new jobs in the mining sector over the next ten years. The outlook is very optimistic in terms of the partnerships you're forming with first nations and with governments. I think we all have a role to play in this.

Thank you for taking the time today to be with us on our panel of witnesses.

The meeting is adjourned.