For me, in reference to our industry, we have a new generation of enlightened mining executives who share a lot of those views. At the Young-Davidson mine, for instance, 81 out of 600 workers are from one of our IBA partner agencies or other first nations. That's 14% of the workforce, and we can always do better. I think his comments around workplace entry programs, free education, and whatever we can do to get more geologists, engineers, and executives from aboriginal communities can only be helpful for our industry.
With respect to your question around what more we can do, I'm hopping on a plane in about five hours, and I'm heading to Zurich for an investor conference. About half of the issuers giving presentations are going to be Canadian miners and Canadian juniors, who are there talking to Swiss funds and Swiss family offices about their projects and their investment theses. My role there is to try to broker those relationships to bring investors into Canada and into these stories.
Investors want to invest in Canada. It's no secret that it's a desirable location, geopolitically. Yes, as was outlined earlier by Mr. Lapointe, the good stuff isn't found in the western developed world. The higher grade stuff is in Colombia and elsewhere, but Canada has a great reputation for excellence, not just with raising capital but also with execution.
I think where we are lacking—I don't say lacking; it's a collected effort—in policy and effort is around innovation. We've spent the downturn spending a lot of time talking amongst ourselves around things like putting more tailings underground, as part of paybacks, which helps build recoveries to solve an environmental footprint issue, as well as providing ventilation on demand so that we're not consuming energy to provide oxygen where there are no employees in an underground stope.
Innovation is huge. There's a great deal of effort being undertaken in the Sudbury area by a number of lead agencies. I would say, in addition to just providing the incentives to encourage investment into Canada, because we are a high cost jurisdiction relative to most of the world, I think anything around innovation and education could only be helpful, because I think we have a long way to go in the mining sector to improve upon mining methods and techniques that have been in place for decades.