That's a very good question. It always concerns me. Take a look at 2008 and 2009. We had one of the largest geochemistry “experiments”, I guess, for lack of a better word, in North America happening in our backyard in Klondike and throughout Yukon with the exploration boom. If you take a look at the initiatives the government provided for at that time, we didn't go to production in any of those areas.
I think what we did was that we heavily invested in certain areas, but we didn't take a look, to your point, on a long-term basis, on a sustainable basis, at the industry and at how to make sure we maximized that local piece. That's key in the first nations government mines. If you're going to open up mines, you can't just have a check box saying you're going to have 25% local hire. You have to really push yourselves to make sure these things happen.
On the one side, it's smart to incentivize the industry to make sure they see the jurisdiction in Yukon as being a great potential. As we saw from the Fraser report on mining, we have tons of potential in terms of being an area for the resource industry moving forward. The other variables that we have to do a better job of controlling are making sure that we're working in partnership with the first nations whose traditional territory is being affected and making sure that we're doing a better job of upgrading the trade skills of the local people.
On the concern of it being a little bit too prescriptive to just Yukon concerns, what we're seeing on a national basis is that it's hard to compete with the provinces sometimes for the jobs in our own backyard. We have companies from down south that are just keeping people employed by coming up and doing contracts in Yukon. That's fine. We see a lot of benefits in that, including the new technologies that come up the road. But we want to make sure that these folks stay in Yukon and become part of our economy as well.
So it's about diversifying, about increasing our population, but also about working with first nations to make sure we maximize the benefits for locals as well.