Natural Resources committee  Thank you for your question. As for the Nunavut government, we can give them the straight facts because Nunavut is a young territory that has 12 years of experience. So there is a lack of experience and a lack of experience as far as economic development is concerned. We hope th

Natural Resources committee  I will start and be very quick. I think we are all in agreement that we need further education. It's not just formal education; it's simple education. You think of a culture in which you have elders who came off the land and then you have children, their grandchildren, who are on

Natural Resources committee  I'll answer you in French. For us, I would say that it's an administrative problem. It's not because of the data collection; it's the duplication and repetition of public hearings. We are wondering why we shouldn't hold a public hearing where all the stakeholders could ask their

Natural Resources committee  Exactly.

Natural Resources committee  We are operating mines in the mountains in Chihuahua state in Mexico. This is the third mine we are building, and the process takes about 15 months. We will be able to follow the file on the Internet to see how it is progressing. So we never wonder where we are in the process. W

Natural Resources committee  In the financial world in which we find ourselves today, a lot of the financial analysts are fund managers, and they have a quarter-to-quarter window. So it either works for them or they don't work. They're willing to invest the money, or they don't. If they see something that is

Natural Resources committee  Probably a bit more frustration will come through. When we look at the GN over the five years we have been there, we can say there's been emphasis on day care and housing assistance, and when you look at the budget and the focus, there's been very little emphasis on economic deve

Natural Resources committee  Any time you set percentage targets it becomes very difficult. We've had that difficulty in some of our contracting out, where the Inuit association requested a minimum target of Inuit people, and when we asked for the local Inuit entrepreneur to meet that commitment, it became d

Natural Resources committee  In our situation at the Meadowbank Mine, 38% to 40% are local Inuit from the Kivalliq region. That would be almost 300 employees.

Natural Resources committee  I would say the majority are entry level, but that is changing. The majority of our equipment operators are now Inuit. We have now been able to train our first Inuit supervisor in the mine, so there is a change. We now have four Inuit mechanic apprentices. But on the hydraulics a

Natural Resources committee  I think additional staff would definitely help, and that is part of the solution. I think the other part of the solution is to have continuity, and not to have anywhere between two to three project leaders on a file and then have to redo it. If there's continuity, that would grea

Natural Resources committee  We believe it does. The main reason we developed the Meadowbank project is that we used our home base in northwestern Quebec, just south of James Bay, and Val-d'Or in the Abitibi, and we could leverage all of our experience, our workforce, and still use a model very similar to wh

Natural Resources committee  I think some of the projects have to be provided with pre-screening. A lot of the projects are technically complicated, and I think you cannot permit the whole project in one lump sum for some of the work. It becomes very difficult and very complex. If there are certain elements

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to hear our story. Agnico has been around the mining industry for over 54 years. We have six mines, four of which are in Canada: one in Nunavut and three in northwestern Quebec. We first acquired the Meadowbank project