I have had several meetings with the company on this issue. I have had a phone conversation with Joe Carrabba who has now moved on. He has been replaced and I have met with his replacement as well to better understand why the company felt the need to do this. We had some discussion and I think the Member has rightly articulated the issues that the company was faced with: a very hot economy in Western Canada; having to compete with the oil sands for labour; having to compete with other projects; the startup of the diamond mine in Nunavut; the Tahera Mine and generally just a booming economy. All of these things were making it difficult.
Roughly 70 percent of their workforce is northern. Thirty percent of the workforce, and it tends to be in more professionalized skill areas, but 30 percent of the workforce currently flies in from the South, and in past they have been requiring them to pay for their travel and they've waived that.
Obviously we were concerned about this. We don't want to see an exodus of people living in the North to the South. But I think after meeting with the company, I have been reassured that the company does have a vested interest in trying to get up to 100 percent in terms of northern workforce. It would be much easier for the company. They see a lower turnover in terms of northern employees who are more acclimatized. So the challenge really becomes one of training, and I think that's why we've pinned a lot of hopes on programs like the Aboriginal Skills Employment Program, and the work of the Mine Training Committee, to make sure we get more people with the technical expertise trained so that we can move forward toward full employment from the North and not have to rely on southern fly-in employees.
So I did talk about our concerns about this, and the company I think is going to work as much as they possibly can to try and work with us and other partners to get our northern workforce increasingly trained. Of course, we're challenged by the fact that we have the lowest unemployment in the country. Despite having pockets of unemployment in some of our smaller more remote communities, it can be up in the neighbourhood of 40 or 50 percent, we do, overall as a territory, have quite a booming economy. So our challenge is to try to get those underemployed people meaningful employment in industry and we're going to work towards that. Thank you.