Evidence of meeting #18 for Natural Resources in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was sibbeston.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Glen Sibbeston  Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters
Bradley Gemmer  President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

4:55 p.m.

Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters

Glen Sibbeston

I'm not at the top corporate level of the Deton'Cho Corporation, but I'll express what I know. It is the development arm of the Yellowknives Dene. As you say, they have approximately 20 companies. It's a northern company. It started with trucking and earthworks and those kinds of activities, and then as people from the Yellowknives Dene, or people from Yellowknife who had aligned themselves with the Yellowknives Dene, showed up with expertise in a different area or in a different field, they would create another company. They were very successful from fairly early on, I understand, and were able to spread out, diversify, and now they have this whole conglomerate.

Trinity Helicopters happened because a helicopter pilot who wanted to start a helicopter company approached them and said he would like to get involved with them. They were the financial backing, to a large extent. The president, whose name is Rob Carroll, offered the know-how in the helicopter industry and how to go about creating a helicopter company, and it went from there. He brought in a couple more managers. Trinity Helicopters is 51% owned by the Deton'Cho Corporation and 49% owned by managers.

We do have a mandate, as all of the Deton'Cho companies do, I believe, to hire and train northern and aboriginal people to the extent that we can.

5 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

How many northern aboriginal people would you actually have working for Trinity Helicopters? I see you have some postings for jobs there for pilots, for mechanics, as well as for some administrative people. How many do you have working for Trinity?

5 p.m.

Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters

Glen Sibbeston

I believe I am the only one. I'm the chief pilot.

5 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

You're chief pilot, so that's not too bad.

5 p.m.

Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters

Glen Sibbeston

I'm talking with a young man from Cambridge Bay, a 100-hour pilot. You have to appreciate that a helicopter pilot is a long way up the skills ladder, so you really have to be careful who you send out with your million-dollar machine and your best customer. It doesn't necessarily always work out well. There's another young man in Dawson I've had conversations with but haven't met, but I'm going to be engaging with both of those individuals. I'm willing, and the company is willing, to work with them to get them into the industry, to get them the skills they need so they can be successful in the industry.

The will has to be there from their point. It is simply not possible to get somebody up to the skill level to send them into the Arctic with a helicopter, and take that responsibility, if they're not willing to put in a lot of hard work.

5 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Okay.

Mr. Gemmer, what are the major pieces of equipment that you've been sending up to the mining companies, and what are some of those challenges that you've had in terms of getting that equipment there? How do you see overcoming some of those things?

5 p.m.

President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

Bradley Gemmer

Probably the biggest difficulty...and it goes along with the time necessary to do the permitting and stuff. For the Baffinland job, for example, we would process material in March and April and send it to Montreal. It would wait for the boat, and the boat would take it up there. In the fall, we managed to build what we'd call a smaller tank, 84 feet in diameter, for about 5 million litres. But we will be going back next spring to use the rest of the steel we sent up. That involves all of the equipment to build the bases, which I didn't necessarily supply, but it had to be there in order to do that.

You have a minimum delay of a year from the day that you're given the go-ahead, let's say. Everything else that's done any quicker than that is done as a speculation play, hoping.... If you want to go along with the example of Cumberland, which was mentioned, I believe they were waiting for two or three years for permits, but I think the average is four to five years. So once you get that....

5 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Allen. Your time is up.

5 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

5 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit

Madame Day, for up to five minutes. Go ahead, please.

5 p.m.

NDP

Anne-Marie Day NDP Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, let me congratulate you on your company. As I understand it, you provide people who do mining research or set things up. You get sites going so that work can then be done.

I was listening to your earlier comments about unhealthy eating and about the fact that they perhaps do not have what they need to handle all the things that might come their way. People in the south—and I am not talking about the United States or countries that are really in the south—are beset with problems of this kind, especially diabetes. It is widespread. So it does not just affect Aboriginal peoples. Anyway, I will pass over views like that, views that clearly I do not share.

Could you tell me if you have employment obligations to Aboriginal peoples and, if so, if you have hired any Aboriginal people up to now? Do you have training obligations to Aboriginal people, or is it just large mining companies that look after that?

5:05 p.m.

President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

Bradley Gemmer

Are you speaking of me personally or of the company?

The variety of areas that I work in go from the west coast of Alaska to the north and east coast of Baffin Island, which encompasses all of Canada. We work...I shouldn't say in spasmodic fashion, but we do a big project here or there.

When we were working north of Yellowknife with the diamond mines, we were hiring people from the local communities there. In the eastern Arctic we had spotty, irregular workers. Either the work didn't interest them, or whatever. We tried our best, but they didn't seem to want to participate in that kind of work. It wasn't their forte, I guess you would say.

That's about all I can say. We try to the maximum, but it's highly specialized work, and people who are not familiar with machinery and equipment, cranes, welding.... There are many things to familiarize yourself with. Most of the people we take have been in the business for many years before they are able to participate fully.

We have tried. In all instances, we put a notice in the community—it might be in a Northern store or a community centre—that we are interested in hiring local people. We've had some success, but not a lot. This is how I got to the concept that the most success I had was when the company, a year ahead of time, developed a school to train people how to work, which is a skill in itself. You assume it—you take a lot for granted—but when people have never had to do anything, to measure a board or a piece of steel or something, all of these things are major things to learn, for people who have never done it before.

We tried and continue to try our best at this, but many of these places are a long way from any communities, and much of the native help in those locales come in from communities that might be 300 or 400 miles away.

In my exposure to the native people I find them family oriented, too; they don't like to be away from their families. They have a very closely knit organization among themselves, and sometimes being 20, 50, or 100 miles out of town represents another problem.

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit

Thank you, Ms. Day.

5:10 p.m.

NDP

Anne-Marie Day NDP Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC

Thank you.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit

Your time is up.

Mr. Trost.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just to follow up on one of my last questions, asking about negative or positive incentivizing, either by putting timelines on or tying various other things to it, I was referring mainly to government bureaucracies and government organizations. Let me be more direct.

Particularly with government bureaucracies, organizations, and permitting operations, what do you feel would be the best thing, across the board but also particularly for smaller operations, to speed the process up and to give a certain level of certainty? What steps concretely could we recommend to make the process simpler and more direct, for smaller enterprises in particular and for all enterprises in general?

5:10 p.m.

President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

Bradley Gemmer

When you build a house, you go to the county, and they'll give you a list of things you have to follow—your engineering and building permits, all the different permits and stuff.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK

Is there one place to list all the permits you would need for mining and exploration projects in the territories?

5:10 p.m.

President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

Bradley Gemmer

There is not, to my knowledge. There are major things, but what this actually means.... I don't know that anybody has really defined those things. I don't think there is a hard and fast definition of the actual procedures. You can't define the time it's going to take, so the fact is that there is probably a lot of wasted time.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK

What should you do to eliminate that waste? Should you have drop-dead deadlines, such that if something isn't deemed to be handed back by the bureaucracy at this time, it automatically goes through? Should you place managers on certain performance bonuses, or the reverse? What should we do to make sure we can get back to a proper level of service from the government?

5:10 p.m.

President, Gem Steel Edmonton Ltd.

Bradley Gemmer

You have to understand, I'm not intricately involved, other than in my own personal thing. It seems to me that it's a wandering kind of process that goes through. One company in the Yukon, for example, Western Copper and Gold Corporation, went through the whole process. At the last minute, it was denied a water licence, which basically shut them down. Something was missed somewhere that caused a huge amount of money to be wasted, thrown out the window totally unnecessarily.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK

Are there any other comments from the other witness?

5:10 p.m.

Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters

Glen Sibbeston

I typically don't deal directly with the licensing functions. I just haven't observed them.

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

Bradley Trost Conservative Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK

But there is a frustration among the clients you deal with?

5:10 p.m.

Chief Pilot, Trinity Helicopters

Glen Sibbeston

There absolutely is. I see it on the ground with things that we're required to do—even objects that I'm required to move—that aren't essential to the operation but are required. For instance, with a class B licence, you're only allowed to have 4,000 litres of fuel in one location. What that means to an operator who needs to get fuel onto a site is that they require two, three, or four locations so that they don't have to get a class A licence.