Natural Resources committee  On the regulatory side, yes, there's still a capacity gap with some first nations that don't have homegrown talent to handle that. They're always at the will of outside agencies and securing funding for mining issues. From the perspective of an aboriginal company, of course we'd

Natural Resources committee  First, I want to say that a report that you should read is the joint task force on education, which my friend and my boss behind me, Gary Merasty, a former MP in northern Saskatchewan, helped drive. It's a great baseline. Gary was tasked by Premier Wall to look at educational com

Natural Resources committee  I don't support a cap, because I think even leaders I've met with from my traditional territory were pushing to get it even with provincial schools. In northern Saskatchewan, you will see two schools—one on reserve, one off reserve—with totally different funding structures. But t

Natural Resources committee  The most recent example I have involves the community of Hatchet Lake Dene, which is one of the last communities not connected by road in Saskatchewan. We personally worked with them, from a corporate side, when I was at Cameco to help lobby both the federal and the provincial go

Natural Resources committee  In my opinion, I think the mining sector has led this. One of the early jobs I did was to go out and recruit and train my fellow Dene people in the Northwest Territories. We did that by doing really hands-on, practical, community-based training. Cameco did it in the eighties and

Natural Resources committee  There's dry book learning and then there's the practicalness of, okay, how does this work?

Natural Resources committee  From my knowledge, we weren't consulted, but it's a conversation we're going to have with our home province and with the federal government.

Natural Resources committee  Thanks for the question. It's a very good question indeed. You can look at Cameco, Teck, Rio Tinto diamond mines, Voisey's Bay, and Musselwhite in northern Ontario. Companies that have been at it a while I think are pushed in this direction initially, but like any good business,

Natural Resources committee  Merci for the question. The easiest answer is to fund education within on-reserve schooling at the same levels as the provinces. The key to getting into university occurs in early childhood education, and the years from kindergarten to grade 4 supply that base level of knowledge

Natural Resources committee  At the current time, mining companies would absolutely be stupid not to engage indigenous communities. We all know that the legal landscape has been confirmed, and that beyond the regulatory duty to consult there is fast becoming a business rationale to proactively engage indigen

Natural Resources committee  Good morning. Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you to the Standing Committee on Natural Resources for the invitation to participate. It's a great pleasure to be here this morning to provide you with my words about how Canada could support innovative and sustainable solutions t

Natural Resources committee  I'm proud to say that I started in the gold mines of the Northwest Territories at 17 as a local indigenous hire. Why did they hire me? Well, in the Northwest Territories resource companies were forced to hire local indigenous people as part of their permits. I began a long and he