Mr. Chair, I appreciate the opportunity to address the committee. My perspective will be that of a company that's working in an area in the country that's experiencing some fairly significant growth. I would suggest we're at the forefront of that challenge for skilled trades and recruiting the talent that's required for us to be able to support the growth in the province.
Just by way of background, SaskPower is a crown corporation. We employ about 3,000 employees in 71 different communities across the province of Saskatchewan. We operate coal, hydro, gas, and wind facilities. We are a completely integrated utility so we generate electricity and do transmission and distribution to the end customer.
From an apprenticeship perspective, we focus on four main areas. The biggest one by far would be our power line technicians. Those would be the folks who climb the poles and connect the power lines across the province. We also have electrician apprentices, industrial mechanics, and instrument technicians. In the past we had welder apprenticeship programs as well, but we recently discontinued that apprenticeship program.
The bulk of our apprenticeship focus is on that power line technician group. We currently have 72 apprentices. They go through a four-year program. We realized we really needed to focus on marketing this program. It's not as commonly understood or as well known as some of the other traditional trades, but obviously is very important to our business. We particularly wanted to make sure we were on the radar of our aboriginal community. We felt that we had an under-representation of aboriginals in our apprenticeship program and in our line trade and we went about correcting that. We employ a sourcing consultant who's strictly focused on that group. We've targeted the youth in our aboriginal communities, and we're very pleased with the success that we've had in terms of increasing the representation of aboriginals in that area.
We will receive upwards of 500 applications for apprenticeship PLT, power line technician, programs annually. Over the last four years we've been able to take our representation from 20% to 25%, particularly in that aboriginal group. That's equated over time to our having about 10% of our line trade represented by the aboriginal community, which we feel is very important for us as we try to make sure that our employee set represents the people of the province of Saskatchewan.
The major challenge that we see from a trades perspective is that we have a bit of a perfect storm from a workforce planning perspective. We've had, and have benefited from, a very stable workforce that's very tenured. We know that one-third of our employees are poised to retire in the next five years, which includes a large number of our skilled trades. We are concerned about our ability to replenish that workforce with youth coming into the apprenticeship programs.
While we do primarily recruit from within the province, we also have participated in job fairs across the country and have gone so far as to travel to Ireland to do some recruiting there, particularly for electricians and for power engineers.
The challenge that we see, particularly in a competitive market space, is that there are a number of employers who are continually competing with each other for the same limited pool of resources. We understand that we're going to need to grow. We can't just steal from other companies. We have to grow our own tradespeople.
The one thing we are very much interested in is making sure the programs are in place that support the free flow and movement of talent across the country. We look for the various trades commissions to standardize some of their Red Seal or different trades certificates to make it easier for an employee who is looking for work in Ontario to come to Saskatchewan and assume a trades position.
With that I'll cut off my comments and leave it to the committee for questions.