Thank you, Mr. Benoit and members of the standing committee, for your kind invitation.
Rather than reading a prepared brief, I provided a deck earlier and I will guide everyone through it.
There are three major challenges to resource development in the north. One is lack of infrastructure, second is challenges presented by the regulatory process, and the third is labour force. I'll be concentrating on this third challenge of labour force development.
We talk about job creation and the numbers needed, but when it gets down to the fundamentals it's all about people, and I would like to share two stories with you. Being from the north, we are natural-born storytellers, so I'd like to tell you about Katrina Stiopu. Kat was about 18 when I first met her in 2009. She had had to quit high school when she was 16 in order to support her family, because her family house burned down and there was no insurance. Kat is a young lady from the Yellowknives Dene.
The moment she turned 18 she came into our offices—18 is the legal age when you can be in a mine in the Northwest Territories. We did some career counselling with her and discovered she really liked to drive big trucks. So we had her trained as a haul-truck driver and now, almost three years later, she has a new home, a new car, and more importantly, a new family.
Mike Fraser had a hard life and did a few things he shouldn't have done and landed himself in jail. While he was there he had a few days or a couple of years to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. When he came out and finished his court-mandated counselling, he came to visit us and we did some work with him and got him trained as a class 1 driver. We also helped him get a job with Robinson's trucking. In October Mike came to visit me at the office just to say thank you for all the support he got from the Mine Training Society, because now he owns his own trucking company and has a longstanding contract to haul contaminated soil down to Zama. He just wanted to acknowledge the support he received from the Mine Training organization.
These are the topics I'm going to cover over the next while with you: a brief history of the Mine Training Society, and the assistance in the development of three other mine training organizations; a typical employment profile for the mines; information on existing labour market; successes in training to date; our industrial and aboriginal partnerships; and the advantages that mine training organizations bring to the table in resource and workforce development.
I would note that I'm going to include data both from Nunavut and Yukon mine training organizations. We like to take a collaborative approach, and this way you get a three-for-one deal.
The Mine Training Society started way back in the nineties. In the early nineties, the Northwest Territories was undergoing a tremendous boom in mineral exploration, which led to the opening of Canada's first diamond mine. The Ekati Diamond Mine, owned by BHP, was commissioned and made operational in 1998.
At that time the giant Con Mines in Yellowknife was facing its closure, the Northwest Territories was undergoing political division with the creation of Nunavut in 1999, and the unemployment rate was 13%.
Diavik Diamond Mines didn't have the luxury of drawing on that same labour pool when it started constructing its mine in 2001 and on its eventual commissioning in 2003. It needed a bit more of an innovative approach to developing its own workforce. Working with the department of education and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, as well as the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and the Chamber of Mines, Diavik sought to create an ad hoc training committee. The committee looked at creative ways of delivering community-based training that would meet the labour force needs of its own operation.
It was a successful model that was used later for the development of the Mine Training Society and was further replicated in northern B.C., the Yukon, and Nunavut in the Kivalliq Region.
As you can see from the table entitled “Typical HR Profile for a Mine”, the careers in mining are not pick-and-shovel jobs any more. The workers have to be skilled, especially when you're driving a Cat 777, which costs on average $2 million and takes a year and a half to replace. Fully 50% of any of the jobs in a mine are trades-related, with another 28% being semi-skilled. Mining is no longer the primary avenue to employment for unskilled, uneducated, or untrained people.
I have also provided a quick slide on the types of jobs in a mine. There are literally hundreds of different types of jobs in mining and mine services.
I have also presented three slides that were obtained from the chambers of mines in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon. Those potential jobs are projected, based on what Tom Hoefer, the executive director from Chamber of Mines in the Northwest Territories, calls his magic-wand scenario. He will be appearing before you at the end of the week.
Those projections are based on the projects coming into minehood—and hopefully those of my colleagues here today—as well as the advanced projects. At its height in 2019, Nunavut may have as many as 5,000 mining jobs. In the Northwest Territories, we would have 2,000 jobs, but we also have the added challenge of our regulatory system. In the Yukon, it would be about 2,500 mining jobs.
I picked a moment, 2017, when several projects will be under way. You will note that I have calculated the annual payroll for each project based on their calculated number of employees. I used the mining industry average wage of $1,600 per week to calculate the payroll value of the projects, which comes to some pretty amazing numbers when rolled up.
The total annual payroll in 2017 for mining alone, if all goes well with the world markets, would be in excess of $789 million for just those three territories. The total number of mine employees would be 9,500 people. And as I like to remind all our partners, we are turning our trainees into future taxpayers, and the potential payroll tax would be over $157 million.
Please keep in mind that for every one job created in mining, three other jobs are created in mine services and services in general to support the miners' families.
Our population is our challenge. The three northern territories, the future for Canada, have less than one third of 1% of the population of Canada, but we take up 40% of the land mass. Although we are small in population, Canada's north contributes significantly to Canada's national GDP. Our reality for the workers in the labour force follows.
Yukon has over 5% unemployment, or just over 1,000 people not working. The Northwest Territories has a 7.4% overall unemployment rate, close to 2,000 people, with a “not in the labour force” population of 6,100. The Northwest Territories tracks this number on a monthly basis, but I was unable to obtain that information for Nunavut or Yukon. “Not in the labour force” is comprised of working-age people going to school, families who have no access to child care, people who are ill or are looking after a family member who is ill, retired persons still eligible to work, and the category that is most disturbing: there are people who want to work, but do not believe jobs are available.
This is supported by the recent Conference Board of Canada report on building a labour force capacity in Canada's north. This report has a survey of northerners' outlooks and wants, and indicates that 60% of the respondents who said that jobs are hard to find in their community are northerners age 35 or older, and those who have not graduated from high school.
Nunavut has the highest unemployment rate of all three territories, officially at 17%. The problem is not unemployment or lack of jobs. The problem or challenge is that the people who are available for jobs do not have the skill sets to meet the requirements for employment in the mining industry. Let's keep in mind that 78% of those jobs in the mine site are for skilled and semi-skilled workers. Fewer than 5% are for those individuals who would qualify as labourers.
This is where the mine training societies come in. The three MTOs are the Northwest Territories Mine Training Society, the Yukon Mine Training Association, and the Kivalliq Mine Training Society, which we hope soon to be the Nunavut Mine Training Society. They have been working to ensure that the local aboriginal populations are able to take advantage of the economic opportunities presented by employment with the mining sector.
We have been very successful to date. Since 2008 we have exceeded the targets laid out between ourselves and the aboriginal skills and employment partnership program. I presented the aggregate numbers for your consideration. We have far exceeded our training targets by 145% and our employment targets by 165%. Please keep in mind that the training delivered is not for entry-level positions. These are skilled and semi-skilled positions such as underground miner, heavy equipment operator, and mineral processors, to name a few.
Training in the north is expensive. However, we have developed an innovative method to train people for underground mining and one that we would like to continue but for a lack of guaranteed funding. The underground miner program, delivered in partnership with Aurora College, has several components that allow aboriginal participants to transition from remote communities to the work site. The program has won the Premier's award for excellence and collaboration, given the numbers of partners involved in the development and the delivery of this program.
The training is 32 weeks long and begins in the home community. In the introduction to underground mining, the participants are given two weeks of employability skills training followed by four weeks of safety and mining modules that follow the common core curriculum. This allows the participants to make informed career choices when entering a career in mining. The successful participants are then invited to submit to the underground miner program.
The participants are assessed against a number of criteria, and they also receive input from the instructors. The community-based instructors teach the underground miner program. This allows the participant from the remote community to already have a point of personal contact when they arrive in Yellowknife.
In this program we have embraced the teachings of the medicine wheel. We deal with participants as a whole person, not just a learning brain. We support the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the person.
They then follow a 12-week training portion at the mine site. We also use simulators and hands-on training.
What makes this model so successful? It's because it's made up of partnerships of like-minded organizations. The Conference Board of Canada has noted that none of the industries, public governments, or aboriginal governments have gone it alone to build labour force development capacity. They have created partnerships to build labour force capacity, and the most successful vehicle to date is the Mine Training Society.
I'm going to skip through the actual structure of the three different societies.
We did a five-year evaluation of our work since 2004. We came up with some pretty interesting data on the outcomes in four areas: our clients, industry, our communities, and governments. We found that as well as providing assistance in skills training and attachment to the workforce, one of the most telling and interesting impact was on the actual face of the workforce. On our trainees, 25% are aboriginal women, which is much higher than the national average of women overall in the mining sector of 5%. I like to think we're changing the face of mining, and it wears mascara.
Women are an under-used resource in the mining industry, and there are definite challenges in child care.
While we work with industry, we also have a significant impact on--