Women Building Futures has had the opportunity to engage in many successful partnerships with industry that have yielded amazing results through partnership and through owners really working with us to ensure that their contractors are hiring the women who come through our programs.
I have a couple of examples with Suncor Energy. We have put 50 women to work in the mines in northern Alberta at Fort Hills and at Millennium mine, and 88% of them have stayed. Their income increased about 168%, and that was all through the initiative of Suncor. Suncor realized that diversity of workforce leads to diversity of thought, and it also realized that this was a much more palatable option, cost-wise, than importing labour from outside of the country and from other provinces. Its workforce right now in operators—those who drive the trucks in the mines—is just about 20% women.
Another partnership we've had that has been extremely successful is with North West Refining, the largest refinery in western Canada over the last 50 years. That was a tripartite agreement between the unions—the iron workers, the carpenters, and the insulators—North West Refining, and WBF...and their contractors as well. NWR was forward-thinking enough to really fund and spearhead this partnership with us, and we went to the unions to help us with the training.
With regard to Denise's point, the women knew they had employment after, so there was that light at the end of the tunnel. Through that partnership we have 50 women who have successfully been trained as iron workers, carpenters, scaffolders, and insulators, and who started their careers as apprentices at the refinery.