Natural Resources committee  We have. We have also been helping those communities by repairing their homes and all that stuff. So, we're doing our fair share to promote ourselves within those communities, and maybe in time we'll be a bigger player.

Natural Resources committee  I would say the best way to do it is to make sure that workers are involved in all negotiations, when you get permits in place and all that stuff, in those areas, and also to make sure that we have the ability to promote that concept as it should be promoted.

Natural Resources committee  In some of our collective agreements, we've actually put in provisions such that we will request that a certain percentage of employees be aboriginal people or women, that's part of the quota. In order to get that, we have to get a collective agreement in place. Unless they see them in the workplace, that's hard to get.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you.

Natural Resources committee  The risk is the lack of training, more than anything. I'll give you another observation. You return home every day. If you're not properly trained, then the risks are a lot higher than for someone who's given the job and told to do it and learn as they go. First of all, have policies in place to make sure the proper training is there before they can commence any type of work in the mining industry.

Natural Resources committee  I know probably in the last 10 years, more emphasis than before has been given to female employees. Years ago, that wasn't the case. There were very few. But the good news is that industry has seen that female operators are more dependable and more able to take care of the machines than male operators.

Natural Resources committee  It is, and because they are non-renewable resources, we have to be sure that the product that we draw from the ground is allowed to be fully processed in Canada before it gets to the point of sale. Currently, we have many industries where the rock is mined in Canada and milled here but sent across the sea to Norway like Glencore, for example.

Natural Resources committee  It's one of the issues. The other issue is to make sure that when a big foreign company comes into Canada, it guarantees jobs for a certain amount of time. I'll give you an example. We had the big layoff in 2009 in Sudbury, Ontario, where at that time Xstrata had just signed a deal to purchase Falconbridge.

Natural Resources committee  I've got some good news. I'm part of the MiHR. One of our new mandates now as a council is to ensure that aboriginal people are part of the training where their skills will be transferable from province to province if they move on. We just started that concept. I presume the government will continue funding that to make sure that happens; that everyone is given the same opportunity as everyone else.

Natural Resources committee  To my knowledge, the issue with that area is that the monies collected from mining firms based on royalties are not equivalent to the actual product being pulled out of the ground. We all know these are non-renewable products. Once you move that rock, it ain't coming back for millions and millions of years—probably never.

Natural Resources committee  High electrical costs are some of the highest costs for employers in the mining industry. The only two provinces that really flourish in that area currently are British Columbia and Quebec. One of the reasons is because both of those provinces generate their own power. They have the ability to tap into the rivers that are nearby and they create their own energy.

Natural Resources committee  That program, in our mind, was put in place to deal with a specific situation at that one point in time. It doesn't really exist anywhere else in the mining industry except for that incident in B.C. itself. I've been in the mining industry for 35 years now. I've worked in uranium mines, nickel mines.

Natural Resources committee  There are four issues I would like the committee to concentrate on, and they are four issues that Unifor feels are important in order for this sector to survive and flourish. We need to establish a foreign ownership policy or define what net benefit really means. The test itself is very vague, and it needs to be amplified.

Natural Resources committee  My name is Richard Paquin, and I'm representing Unifor. Jerry Dias, our national president, asked me to come and speak on his behalf, since he's busy bargaining with Ford now. We'll see how that goes. I'm the recently appointed new director of mining for Unifor. We represent roughly 11,000 members across the country, most of them in B.C. and Quebec, which represent roughly 20% of our membership of 310,000 members in this particular natural resources department.