As workforce grows at Giant Mine cleanup project, local hiring is not keeping pace
CBC
The proportion of hours worked by Indigenous and northern workers on the Giant Mine Remediation Project has dropped over the last few years, according to figures provided to Yellowknife city council this week.
Speaking to a council committee on Wednesday, Andrei Torianski, economic developer with the multi-billion-dollar remediation project, showed a five-year employment trend comparing three groups: northern Indigenous hires, northern non-Indigenous hires and southern hires.
Torianski was asked whether the multi-billion-dollar project was meeting its employment targets for northern and Indigenous workers.
"We are not,” he said.
The $4.38-billion federal cleanup project, which is expected to continue until 2038, has struggled for years to hire more local workers.
The project tracks employment by hours worked. In 2023, CBC reported that northern workers accounted for around 45 per cent of the total labour hours, on average, and Indigenous employees worked around 21 per cent.
That was below the project's target for hours worked by northerners, which is between 55 and 70 per cent, and its target for Indigenous workers, which is 25 to 35 per cent.
Figures presented to councillors on Wednesday show that those figures have dropped further below those targets.
The project measure employment through full-time equivalent (FTE) positions rather than the number of workers.
Between 2019-2020 and 2024-25, the total workforce on the project grew from 93 full-time equivalent positions, to 389. But, in that same time frame, the number of northern Indigenous FTEs rose from 16 to 42, and northern non-Indigenous hires rose from 25 to 59.
That means the proportion of northern and Indigenous FTEs on the project has shrunk since the 2021-2022 year.
Still, Torianski said overall, northern employment has grown as the project's whole workforce has grown.
“Unfortunately, it has not kept up with the pace needed to continue to support the work on the project and we had to supplement with southern [hires],” he said.
Torianski also said the remediation project does not directly hire people. Instead, it contracts other groups to do the hiring. But, he said the project does give incentives to hire Indigenous people.
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