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.