With respect to the one in two, at our mine sites, 50% of our employees are northern first nation and/or Métis people. They are spread out over the different types of positions you see listed there.
Unfortunately, the challenge for us going forward, and for the communities, is not a labour shortage as much as it is a skill shortage. We are running into situations, as the communities are very clearly telling us, with regard to graduation levels from high schools, especially with adequate math and science, where having adequate facilities and adequate funding is putting a strain on the number of high school graduates eligible for trades and the higher science-related professions in the industry....
We work very closely with them on how we can address that. One example of that is that we work with the aboriginal skills employment program in a program established in northern Saskatchewan: northern career quest. Our goals there were to target 3,000 first nations and Métis people as to their career paths and aspirations, put 1,500 of them into training, and employ 750 of them. In the three and a half years that we've been in this program, out of four years, we've exceeded those targets. We now have more than 1,000 people employed in our industry throughout northern Saskatchewan.
But the pressure remains. We are sitting on a huge retirement bubble of skilled people. There are only 40,000 people in the north, half of whom are under the age of 20, and there is a graduation rate that is in the 35% to 42% range. Between the first nations and the mining companies, we have a great interest in working together to increase those numbers.