Remote reserves face job-skills gap
FORT HOPE FIRST NATION, Ont . – Roland Okeese is watching with keen interest as mining companies stake claims in the area around his remote northern Ontario reserve.
The 36-year-old father of six and grandfather of two is in his prime — strong, healthy and hopeful for a new career supporting the mining activity in the Ring of Fire. For Okeese and so many other community members, however, the path from here to there is difficult.
Okeese knows the wild country well. He’s good with a power saw. He has a few months’ experience doing contract work for Noront Resources. But for much of his adult life, he was wrestling with an addiction to the prescription painkiller OxyContin. He didn’t graduate from high school. And his formal training is minimal.
“I’d like for the (mining) to happen. I’d choose to be working,” he says defiantly, recognizing that some in his community don’t share his view. “But I don’t have the skills.”
It’s a problem that needs to be resolved soon if a local workforce is to benefit fully from the mining activity poised to take off in the Ring of Fire. Indeed, there is a newly formed consensus among federal and provincial officials, native communities and major companies that aggressive training programs need to be set in place now.
“We’re worried about that because I don’t think it’s too early to get started even right now,” says Bill Boor, senior vice-president of global ferroalloys for Cliffs Natural Resources, a multinational mining company that wants to go into production in 2016 or 2017. “We need a lot of employees for this type of operation. … We’re very anxious to get started.”
Toronto-based Noront, which wants to open a nickel mine, is in the midst of forming a coalition with the drilling program at a college in nearby Thunder Bay and looking at ways to bring the training programs into local communities so that potential workers don’t need to travel far from home.
The company aims to have a third of its workforce requirements filled by local aboriginal workers, far higher than the national mining-sector average of about eight per cent, says Leanne Hall, Noront’s vice-president of human resources.
While Grade 12 is usually a basic requirement for any job even distantly related to mining, Hall says her company is considering training options that would take life experience and traditional knowledge into account.
Cliffs is taking a different approach, talking to First Nations about pre-development agreements that would map out a framework for getting communities ready for eventual mining, and would serve to bring First Nations officials up to speed before they get into more formal negotiations for impact-benefit agreements.
Government, too, appears to be gearing up to put the necessary tools into place.
While there is no rule requiring any company to hire from local First Nations, employment is likely to be part of the benefit agreements they negotiate with the mining companies operating on their traditional lands. And it often makes business sense, since First Nations peoples feel at home in the wild, remote area 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, and are likely to stick around.