Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. I wanted to talk to you this morning about the process that the Wabun Tribal Council uses in Timmins to engage with the mineral and mining sectors in our territory.
Just to tell you a bit about myself, I'm the executive director of the Wabun Tribal Council and I've been working there for 25 years. Our group is a group of five first nations located in Timmins, Ontario. We've been around since 1989. Our chiefs make up our board of directors, and they send their greetings to everyone this morning.
What we do on a daily basis is regional planning on health, economic development, and a number of sectors with respect to delivering services to our communities.
I apologize; I had a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the group, but I had a bit of misstep and I was unable to get them to you in French, so they will be provided to you at a later date.
What's in front of you is a bit of a map of our traditional territorial geography. The map of Ontario in red gives you a snapshot in the white of where our traditional territories are, the five collective territories of the communities. On the back of that map, the green blob is the collective territory of the five first nations.
One of the things we like to talk about in our communities is that we are the most explored group of first nation communities in the country. We have currently 10 mines operating within our traditional territories, with three mines now in development. We also deal with over 80 mineral exploration permits on a daily basis, and we also have 10 mine closure plans that we are currently dealing with. As you look at that green area, all of those activities are happening within that section of the province of Ontario. It keeps my colleagues and me at the tribal council extremely busy.
In terms of our agreements, what we do at the tribal council is look to engage directly with proponents. We look to have legally binding arrangements created between proponents and our first nations. You could call them impact benefit agreements, resource development agreements, memoranda of understanding—all apply. In our territory we have over 55 of these with junior mining companies, exploration entities. We have seven impact benefit agreements with operating mines and we are currently negotiating six impact benefit agreements with either existing producing mines or mines that are being proposed.
I think this gives you a pretty good sense of the scope and scale of how our communities are so busy dealing with the mineral sector.
I think it's important to note that we also deal with brownfield sites, so we've managed to work with operating mines, mines that have been around for 100 years. In the Timmins camp, for example, Goldcorp has been working there for 100 years. We just finished our impact benefit agreement with them last year. Whether it's a new mine or an older mine, our community's expectation is we would have some sort of arrangement with those facilities.
I want to talk a bit about capacity of the first nations. I've talked about how busy we are. We have exactly seven people within our communities to deal with all of this work. One of the things we really like to stress to government—both the Ontario government and the federal government, in this case—is the necessity to ensure that the communities have the capacity to deal with the mining industry.
What we tell mining proponents in our traditional areas is that the agreements are mandatory. They're not requested or they're not optional. Our communities expect them. There was free, prior, and informed consent, which was mentioned earlier in the hearings. We like to think those are principles that we operate on, and again we are expecting the mining companies to come forward, participate, and sign these agreements with our communities.
What's in our agreements? The exploration agreements contain things like a standardized and consistent template. When we deal with junior mining companies, it's always the same way. We have a template. It's one template, and we don't change it. We want to make sure that we're dealing with one company the same way that their sister company on maybe adjacent claims may be operating. We want to make sure we're dealing with those two entities exactly the same in an exploration agreement.
We talk about financial compensation and accommodation for impact in our agreements. We talk about business opportunities, employment and training, elders' knowledge, and environmental committees for support of the project. We talk about IBA negotiations should a mine be developed. The continuation of our exploration agreement is that the exploration entity commits to negotiating an impact benefit agreement for an operating mine.
For impact benefit agreements, essentially the same schedule of benefits is laid out. We have elements of revenue-sharing and profit participation by the communities. All the impact benefit agreements are different. They're not the same as the exploration agreements. Each impact benefit agreement is unique.
They often take years to negotiate. We just signed with Tahoe Resources on Thursday. We had a celebration in Timmins with the chiefs in the communities. The president of Tahoe Resources came in from Nevada. We signed our agreement. It was six years in the making. They're quite complex, and each is different.
Again, we talk about employment and training, business opportunities, cultural participation, environmental protection, and dispute resolution mechanisms, all as part of a detailed impact benefit agreement between proponents and our first nations.
I should also mention that five of our communities, the five first nations of the tribal council, are called tier one-impacted communities on the Energy East right-of-way. We would suggest that a type of impact benefit agreement negotiation or settlement with the pipeline would be an option for us to participate with them. I want to emphasize that we don't think it's just for the mineral sector. We're also involved with renewable energy, and we think that for Energy East, an impact benefit agreement may be the approach to the Energy East pipeline.
What are the benefits to the proponents we've talked about? The benefits to our communities are clear. The benefits to our communities are real and significant. We also believe that they're real and significant for the proponents as well. Our process provides certainty of project. Our agreements speak specifically to the process of how proponents are expected to engage in consultation and accommodation. We agree on the terms, and those provide the certainty.
It's the same thing for regulatory approvals. We work together on permits and processes, whether they be federal or provincial. We agree to work together to ensure that the regulatory environment is serviced.
We also believe that it gives the companies a social licence to operate. Again, in our case, we think that agreements are mandatory, and we think that the agreements provide that social licence for companies to operate in our territories.
We have some challenges. The current regulatory environment does provide disagreeable proponents the opportunity to navigate the system without having any sort of agreements with communities. They're not mandatory. There are ways that projects can go forward without, in my opinion, meaningful engagement with our first nations. We fight tooth and nail against those disagreeable proponents, but I have to say it's less than 5%. You saw the number of agreements that we're dealing with, and I would say that for the most part, we have very happy explorers and resource users in our territory. It's a very minimal amount that are disagreeable.
We have issues with the inconsistency of the delegation of the duty to consult. We're finding now that government is inserting itself between us and the discussion with the proponents. In particular, the Ontario government has taken a position to deal directly with the proponent, pushing the first nations to the side, so we're not able to have that direct engagement with mining companies and proponents that are actually on the ground. I think it's an impediment to having a good relationship between ourselves and the developers.
Territorial overlap is a challenge. In our case, we've managed to convince our five communities to work together. If we see a territorial overlap, we have one agreement, one proponent, and have the three or four or five communities deal directly with the proponent under the one agreement. We've actually done that with communities outside of the tribal council as well. It's not necessarily the five members of our communities that would be involved in those agreements.
As far as recommendations for the group are concerned, we would love to see arrangements legislated as a requirement, both provincially and federally. It would take out the uncertainty of whether or not proponents have to come and negotiate. We would like to suggest a framework for consultation and accommodation that creates a joint declaration for regulatory approval. We would offer that the Wabun model could be used as a best practices example to whoever might like to use it.
We would like to suggest that there is an extreme shortfall in capacity funding in our communities, and there should be some method to ensure that capacity is funded.
With that, meegwetch. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure to be here.