Thank you for allowing that.
I have a couple of quick comments. All the trades activities in the institutions are open to all offenders. We encourage all offenders—aboriginal and non-aboriginal— to participate, and we can share some statistics with you shortly in terms of those participation rates. But in terms of the broader question, looking forward, clearly there are various sectors we want to become more engaged with. Actually, I believe this committee can help us in terms of reaching out to some of them.
You mentioned, for example, the diamond industry. One of the challenges we have there is with someone with a criminal record being able to get into diamond mining businesses. Their security is almost as tight as mine—I won't say it is tighter, but it's almost as tight as mine—and the issue of a criminal record has come up many times.
That being said, there are other areas we've been exploring, particularly with regard to getting aboriginal offenders more involved. For example, in the construction field, we have been engaged with several first nations communities and their economic development groups in terms of building homes for first nations reserves. We've been quite successful at that, and as a matter of fact, we have agreements with the ones who were doing the work such that we have to ensure that a percentage of the offenders involved in that construction training are aboriginal offenders. We see that as very, very positive. We've had arrangements with the Bay of Quinte Mohawks, and with Muskeg Lake and Whitefish Lake. We've built houses for the communities up in Lac La Ronge, and we have other projects under way.
We are also quite interested in reaching out to the oil and gas industry. There's less concern about an individual's criminal history there than there is in the diamond mining area. We're in some very, very early discussions, through networks of our other partners, to start looking at how we can have the oil and gas industry bring its money and training into our institutions. We have the manpower and the woman power. They have the money; they have the training. Match the two up and get individuals trained, so that as they come out there is a ready supply of workers who can go out into the oil and gas industry across the country and become employed and become law-abiding citizens.
This is an area in which we're starting to knock on doors and one we want to pursue further. Again, there's great interest in terms of opportunities for aboriginal offenders.