Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, committee members.
Craig and I are here today representing Whitesand First Nation. We're here to tell a story of one community's vision of the bioeconomy. Craig and I are the community leads on this project since 2009. It's been a very challenging journey that we've travelled to get this project to where it is today.
Before I begin, I should note that in 1992, Whitesand and the hamlet of Armstrong proposed a new way of forestry that included a bio-cogeneration plant to help displace diesel use in our community. That never went forward, and that's a million litres of diesel fuel a year, just for electricity. We've kept this vision alive, and we thought the best way to talk about it was to provide a presentation. I don't know if we'll get to all the slides, because we could talk about this for days.
We'll begin with the presentation. If a picture says a thousand words, our cover slide says ten thousand, and we really believe the approach we put together meets the need for energy independence, environmental integrity, and economic development all through the bioeconomy.
We came together in 2009, Craig and I, and developed the community sustainability initiative. It's five pillars of sustainability, it recognizes all the issues we face as a community, and it recognizes how we can look at a new future by developing a different approach through the bioeconomy.
Today we're just going to talk a bit about where we began, where we are, where we are heading as a community, and how Natural Resources Canada has played a significant role in getting us to where we are today.
Whitesand is 250 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. We're not on the electricity grid, and we will never be connected to the grid. We were identified in the long-term energy plan as never being connected. Of course, we also don't have natural gas, so we're a fully diesel-dependent community for both electricity and home heating. We have a population of about 1,200, with 400 currently on reserve.
I'll be quite blunt about this current reality we're in. We're on diesel fuel, we're in the middle of the boreal forest, we're nearing max power for housing, and we can't do anything for economic development because there isn't enough power. Past industry use was to take the trees and take them to Thunder Bay for processing. That process failed; the industry collapsed. It was horrible for a lot of people, but it opened the wood supply for us through a competitive wood competition. That really was the window that moved us forward.
We also have a very high unemployment rate—70% to 80%—so we're always in recession. Social assistance is the bulk of family income.
Many are without grade 12. They leave public school in Armstrong and go to Thunder Bay; many drop out, which just continues the cycle, including drug dependencies. We don't shy away from that. It's something we have to deal with, and this project has been designed to help do that.
What is our project? It's everything. It's a five-megawatt combined heat and power plant from biomass, which will replace diesel electricity. It's a 60,000- to 90,000-tonne wood pellet plant, so we can convert our homes to wood pellets from diesel and ship pellets elsewhere throughout Canada. It will support other industry as we get full stand utilization—as we're using hardwoods, primarily—and it will reduce GHG emissions.
Currently, through partnership funding from Canada, Ontario, and Whitesand, we have prepared the site for construction. We've done all our road layouts, we've got the pads ready for concrete, lighting is in, and all the roadwork is in. Our plan is to go to full construction next year. This project cost us $4 million in total, but again it was a partnership approach, and Whitesand has put in a lot of money through the years in the project.
We've had to do many complex things. We had to get the Ontario renewable energy approval. For a five-megawatt biomass plant? We're not burning tires, but it cost us almost a million dollars to do. We had the environment minister come to us and apologize that he was talking about the green, low-carbon economy and making us do a REA.
We didn't fight it. We figured out a way to do it, and we've done it. It's the first of its kind in Ontario. All of our engineering is completed, and we have the first-of-its-kind power purchase agreement in Ontario, which is a 20-year renewable revenue stream for the electricity we're producing. It actually gave us an economic development adder, which recognized the social, economic, and environmental benefits of our project. It's a unique way of looking at the bioeconomy and, if you're going to produce power, how provincial governments can support that type of initiative.
We've completed negotiations. Even though we had a directive, which is public knowledge, it still took us over two years to negotiate with IESO for those contracts, but it's the first of its kind.
What does that mean to us? It means 60 full-time jobs. If you think 400 people and what 60 jobs does at $3.5 million in annual wages, it's significant. If you move that over to Toronto or Ottawa, what type of plant would we be talking about? It's all through the bioeconomy.
How did we get this far? Craig and I sometimes look at ourselves and we say we don't know how. We've lived fiscally...writing funding proposals, looking for support. It's not a traditional project in the forestry industry where a bigger company could come and say, we see an opportunity, let's do our feasibility study, let's do our engineering, and let's build the thing. We haven't been able to do it that way. It's been very difficult, but we've kept this going based on the need of the community. What we're trying to show in Canada is a completely different way of looking at things.
Without NRCan, especially the indigenous forestry initiative, we would not be here today. That support has helped us at all of these steps, along with Ontario funding, and both FedNor and INAC have been involved. However, Natural Resources Canada has been our mainstay and our main helper. We've even used some of the scientific research reports to help move the project forward.
This rather complex-looking slide is about looking forward to 2025. What does the sustainable bioeconomy look like? We're now having the local forest for a local community maximizing benefits from it. We're creating our own electricity. We're producing economic development of a wood pellet plant. We're going to use waste heat for a greenhouse for fresh vegetables for the community.
It's full circular. We're going to look at new housing and using some of the wood for our own houses. All of our circles and community sustainability are within it now. As a special note, by the year 2050—and this was an analysis done by both Canada and Ontario—we will be reducing 488,000 tonnes, or 163 tonnes per person, of GHG, compared to Ontario's target of 26 tonnes per person. It is revolutionary. It's something that is based on Swedish and Finnish models. It's a bioeconomy village.
To close, I think what drives me and Craig in this project is the notion that if you're on social assistance in Canada, you're living in poverty. I don't believe that with the wealth and resources from our forests, from all of our natural resources, and from our innovation in Canada, anybody should be living in poverty.
For the committee, we're not here to get more or do more. We're here just to let you know that the bioeconomy is something special. It needs any type of support, as these gentlemen have said, that can help it flourish. What does it mean for social growth, economic development and environmental responsibility? In a community like Whitesand, carbon reduction through the bioeconomy is poverty reduction, and to me that is one of the loftiest goals anybody can try to do.
We want to thank you for your time, and today is a very big day for us. At the Treasury Board Secretariat of Ontario this morning, the Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry is presenting our project to the Ontario greenhouse gas reduction account for $30 million in capital funding.
That is hand in hand with Canada's low carbon economy leadership fund, which Ontario nominated us for as their priority project. That would also give us $20 million. That $50 million in capital funding has allowed us to secure $22 million in financing as a small first nation.
We're very confident that this is going through and that we'll be beginning construction this year. We extend an invitation to this committee to have a meeting up there in two years' time when we're built, to see what the bioeconomy looks like.
Thank you.