Native hiring policies fall short of original goals

For some time now provincial governments and Ottawa have encouraged mining companies to adopt pro-native, pro-northern resident hiring practices. Companies, anxious to win support from local residents and gain a stable workforce, have often been supportive. Early on, the attempt was accompanied by a certain naivete. Today, realism guides policymakers.

For example, the government of Saskatchewan encourages native northern hirings. Clauses within a Northern Surface Lease, signed by the companies and the government, see to that. “The lease could be cancelled for non-compliance,” says Brian Goffin, the provincial government’s manager of the Northern Affairs Secretariat. “That would be very heavy-handed and we haven’t found it necessary,” he said.

For the most part, such government-company agreements do not set precise quotas. Such a quota system failed at Nanisivik, N.W.T., perhaps the last of the mining-based northern settlements. It was built in the mid-1970s around a zinc-lead deposit on the northern coast of Baffin Island. Hoping to establish Nanisivik as an economic engine for the northeastern Arctic, Ottawa initially targeted a 60% native employment rate; the company, Mineral Resources International, had targeted 50%.

Both projections were naive. The real rate has averaged 25%. Says former mine manager Jim Marshall: “We plateaued at that level for a number of reasons.” But mainly the Inuit way of life is semi-nomadic, depending on whale and caribou movements, and far less structured than industrial society’s. Native hiring practices in the Northwest Territories today reflect a new realism. At Colomac, an open pit gold mine several hundred kilometres north of Yellowknife that succumbed to lower gold prices after barely a year in operation — again, recent, though redundant, proof of the transience of such operations — a formal agreement signed by the mining company and the Dog Rib Tribal Council had aimed for at least 25% native employment. The company was to use its “best efforts” to attain the native hiring target, and it was met up until the closing.

Saskatchewan has a better record. In 1990, the northern resident contingent (almost entirely native) at Key Lake comprised 36% of total manpower; at the province’s other two uranium mines, Rabbit Lake and Cluff Lake, 33% and 42%, respectively. The latest figures available (1987) are less impressive at Polaris, with 9.3%, and Lupin, 7.9%. Right across Canada, the LDC mine average is 19%, or in absolute numbers, 390 native workers out of a mixed aggregate of 2,233.

According to Keith Storey and Mark Shrimpton at Newfoundland’s Memorial University, native employment successes in Saskatchewan are mainly a function of a readily available northern native population. Neither Lupin nor Polaris can draw on local labor to the same degree.