Thank you for inviting us today.
My name is Paul Semple. I'm the chief operating officer for Noront Resources. Leanne Hall, our vice-president of human resources, is with me today.
I'll give you a quick overview on Noront. We're an innovative junior mining company that is committed to excellence and aboriginal inclusion in our projects. We believe in responsible development. Our projects right now are located in northwestern Ontario in the Ring of Fire, approximately 700 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. We have been involved up there for over seven years and have spent in excess of $200 million exploring for base metals: nickel, platinum, and copper. We have an advanced project, the Eagle's Nest mine; we're going through the permitting and are in the process of developing it. We expect that project to start construction next year. With completion of construction in early 2018 there's a forecast of an 11-year mine life. With exploration targets we expect the project to go for at least another decade or so.
The capital costs we're talking about for our project are about $600 million to $700 million. That is exclusive of infrastructure that would be shared between the local communities. We expect our project would employ 400 direct jobs and about 1,200 indirect jobs during operations and construction.
The Ring of Fire is located in the middle of Nishnawbe Aski Nation. The project is surrounded by 15 first nations communities. The closest non-first nations community is Pickle Lake, which is about 300 kilometres away. Very early on, we recognized that a successful development in this part of the country would require a significant relationship and partnering with the local communities. The communities suffer challenges that are not unique to first nations communities. They are pretty severe in that part of the world where we are dealing with communities with 90% unemployment. We started early on working on a model on how we would engage with the communities and use and integrate them as part of our business development plan. Based on the close proximity and the available labour pool, we saw that this was not only a responsible initiative to development but also good business for us.
Noront is a small, developing company. We have about 26 full-time employees right now. We have self-identified aboriginals at all levels in our organization from senior officers to labourers in the field. As we grow our project, we've worked on a workforce development study whereby we identified all the jobs we have. We've been looking at what levels of skills and training we need. About 60% to 85% of the jobs are low to middle level and are trainable for our workforce who come from the local labour pool. Another 15% would be mining professionals, accountants, and other professionals, which would be further down the road from first nations capacity building.
One of the programs we looked at early on was that if we were going to be successful in engaging and creating opportunities for the local workforce, we needed to start a training initiative much earlier in the process than after the project was built and then try to create opportunities for people only in the operations. We saw that the construction period is a critical part of training and developing that workforce so we've been pushing training initiatives as early as possible.
In 2009 we started a community industry educational initiative, which we call the Ring of Fire training alliance. That is an agreement that was signed in 2012 among us: Noront Resources, Confederation College, and KKETS, which is the training arm of the Matawa tribal council. The key objective of that was to define sustainable work paths for interested community members. Those might be in the mining industry. We've identified about 127 different professions that are involved in one way or another from accountants to pilots to miners to lawyers to nurses to pilots to teachers, and the list goes on. Under this, we've been working on work assessments. We've gone into the communities. We've assessed more than 330 Matawa First Nations community members, and more than 160 members have completed the first days of their mining essentials and mining readiness program. We're proud to say that there's a graduation rate of 83% from that program.
We've done nine of these programs directly in the community. We're gearing up for the next phase, which deals with training in occupational skills, environmental monitoring, camp support, cooking, underground core, common core, underground drilling, heavy equipment operation, and the trades.
We are integrating the contractors who are involved with us into the program. Those contractors who are not willing to work with us on training initiatives—so that at the end of the day we will have a trained capable workforce—are not high in our procurement priorities. We've entered into partnering agreements with numerous tier-one mining contractors.
With regard to where we are and what we can do better, for the duration of the current programs, the SPF funding will be out there only until March 31, 2015, so we see that as a challenge for us. We look at the ongoing training reaching out long into the future and continuing to provide opportunities in our operations and other planned operations in northwestern Ontario. We need some flexibility in the process. There is a huge push to create jobs instantly. At the end of the programs, we obviously would like to do that, but sometimes there are permitting issues and things like that which are out of our control. We can't necessarily create the jobs because we're waiting for permits to go through the process, which takes longer than we expect. That isn't really a failure of the training process; it's a failure and a challenge of the permitting process. Tying those two together is a challenge.
The funding for these programs is challenging. We have been able to secure federal funding of $5.9 million for this initiative, but we have yet to see any money from the province. Then we get into the question of harmonized integration of programs for training of trades and what should be federal dollars and what should be provincial dollars.
The last thing I would say is that I believe we've taken an innovative approach and an early approach, but doing that has come at a cost of having a lengthy program with a lot of red tape and bureaucracy, maybe because what we're trying to do doesn't quite fit into any box.
It took us three years and 25 revisions to our proposal to get this through and to start the program that we're now seeing the benefits of. With the deadline and the sunset of this program coming, it's a shame to see those efforts wasted. We believe we have the right initiative. We believe we have a successful program. We hope this will get extended and continue to advance a program that's beneficial both to us and to the communities in which we intend to operate.
Thank you.