I'll condense the twenty minutes into two.
I grew up in northern Saskatchewan in a community called Pelican Narrows. My family were fishermen and trappers. That was the primary mode of employment and socio-economic activity. There wasn't a lot of mining. There was some in the very far north with the original uranium mining, but aside from that and forestry, it was living off the land.
Also, having been a teacher, that being my first training, I know that the impacts of development have been positive. Now, there are always concerns, and you have to mitigate those concerns about the impact on the environment, about the social impacts, and about all those other impacts that we talk about and study and look at.
But in the last number of years, we have undertaken a study with an economist from the U of S and have determined through that piece of work that, between Cameco and AREVA, one out of every twenty aboriginal jobs in Saskatchewan is with our companies. We know that there's a two-for effect: every time we hire a northern aboriginal person, another position is created somewhere in the north. Also, there is another position created in the south because they go and buy their trucks, flat screen TVs, and other things in the south.
We know that in the next little while it's going to be a challenge to sustain our 50% aboriginal employment number. We're only seeing about 100 to 125 grade 12 graduates a year. Next year we have to hire about 430 people. If you extrapolate that 10 years, we're going to have a major shortage. The last thing we want--and the first nation and Métis communities have told us that it's the last thing they want--is to be left behind. So the training programs that we just talked about are absolutely critical, starting in the K to 12 system and moving on to the college and university level.
As a bit of a response to MP Trost's question, engineering is one of those positions we'd like to get and simply get it started. We are seeing another 20 to 30 years of activity in the mining industry, so let's just get started. We view the aboriginal community as a competitive advantage.