I'll answer from our site in Saskatchewan, if I can.
I can give you a chemical example on this front. We have the northern preferred supplier program. We set a target a few years back: 35% of all goods and services provided or required at our mine sites would be provided by aboriginal-owned companies. But we put a caveat on what an aboriginal-owned company is. It was one that is 51% or more owned by an aboriginal community or individual, so that there's real capacity and real management developed there, and so on.
Through our northern preferred supplier program, we work with our communities to do forecasting of business opportunities. We do workshops on how to become a supplier with Cameco. We've engaged preferential bidding processes. We sole-source opportunities as they fit the capacity of the potential northern aboriginal supplier, and we provide evergreen opportunities.
We have, in northern Saskatchewan, aboriginal-owned companies in catering, trucking, construction, security, engineering, road construction, and so on. I can say that we've exceeded our 35% target. We're closer to having 70% of all the services at our mine sites provided by northern aboriginal-owned companies. The site benefit of this is that 50% of their employees are aboriginal or northern. We employ 1,500 directly at Cameco. Our contractors employ another 1,500, so we're talking about 3,000 aboriginal employees through this process.
I can say that since 2004, we've procured over $1.6 billion from these aboriginal-owned companies in northern Saskatchewan, and by the end of 2012 we're confident that we'll exceed $2 billion.