There's another benefit that could occur if positive procurements happen. Again, our community dealt with two big issues. One was a gypsum mine that was being built down the road from us. The company came in and said that it was a unionized thing and that we had to be part of that union or the union was going to shut this thing down. We said we were an aboriginal group and these were our lands. We said, “In fact, if you don't let us into the union”—we wanted to get into the union—“this mine is not working, and 80 guys are out of business.”
What happened is they said okay. We cut a deal. We said, “Let's get our guys to pay the union dues that they're supposed to pay”, even though they didn't want to pay, and then the mine was successful.
The next thing was, again, a positive thing may not sound positive to you, but it's just driving the point home. We had to create a policy on procurement. We built a multi-million-dollar convention centre to tie into our hotel operations. The company from Cape Breton, a heavily unionized company, came in and said they were a union, they were going to bid on this, and they were going to use their workers. We had all these guys who didn't have their carpentry papers, as an example, or their plumbing papers. We said we wanted them to work on that convention centre. It's a multi-million-dollar business opportunity. The company, Joneljim Construction, eventually agreed to our demands—it's our money, too, that we're paying them—to bring in the workers.
It opened up a whole variety of things, a great relationship with the Province of Nova Scotia on bringing people who normally would go into collecting social welfare into a training program to help those guys get their papers. I wanted to highlight that as a positive way that this will also benefit our communities, if a procurement program takes those types of factors into consideration.
Thank you very much. Sorry for taking a lot of mike time.