Absolutely.
Currently two sorts of partnerships have been created in B.C., one in the interior and the other one in the northwest, to increase aboriginal participation in the industry but also to create capacity for their own respective communities.
One is the School of Exploration and Mining in the northwest. They provide environmental monitoring training for aboriginal youth. These youth are actually working in both the industry and their own bands. They become the environmental monitors for them. So it's not industry-specific training, it's environmental monitoring training. Those skills are very transferable. They can be applied to different sectors.
In the interior right now, there is a very strong partnership that is at risk, if I may say, as a result of federal funding not having been approved yet. If I could put in a pitch for that, it's something that I would be very interested in.
This partnership is creating training opportunities and job opportunities for underground mining in the Kamloops area. We do have a mine that is about to open up, the New Afton mine, in the Kamloops area. This particular program, the British Columbia Aboriginal Mine Training Association program, is essentially preparing the future workers for that particular mine. The industry has come to the table with funding and money. We just need to figure out how we're going to get the additional funding that used to come from the federal government and that now isn't there—yet.
In terms of other initiatives, the industry has come together over the last few years to develop a strategy to deal with the workforce shortages. We've been successful to a certain extent, but things are happening fast. As I said, the concern is that we will have to continue to look abroad, which is not the ideal resolution to the problem, as we would like to create those opportunities for, in our case, British Columbians.