Thank you, Mr. Chair, committee members, and Chief.
It's my pleasure to be here today to talk to you about our favourite project, BEAHR—“building environmental aboriginal human resources”. What I'd like to talk to you about today is the success we've had in including aboriginal people as part of the environmental workforce and potential activities for capacity-building in the future and how these might fit in with the role of this committee.
First of all, ECO Canada is a sector council. We're part of the sector council program the Government of Canada began back in 1992. Our mission is to ensure an adequate supply of people with the appropriate skills and knowledge to meet the environmental human resource needs of the public and private sectors. We have both a qualitative and a quantitative aspect to our mission, which is to ensure that we have enough people and that they have the appropriate skills and knowledge to do the work.
We are an industry-initiated and industry-led group that is a partnership of industry, governments—federal, provincial, municipal, aboriginal—and the academic community across the country. We have about 175,000 members across this country. And indeed, we represent environmental employment in terms of the quality of the people required to do environmental work in Canada.
In 2001 we formed a partnership with the Aboriginal Human Resource Council to develop the BEAHR program. This gave us the authority, then, to look at those particular activities as we moved forward. We identified, as far back as 1997, in an aboriginal training survey we did, that approximately 80% of employers were willing to hire aboriginal environmental practitioners, but 50% of them indicated that they lacked candidates for those positions. Further, 64% said that the people who applied did not have the appropriate skills and knowledge.
That led us then to ask how we could set up a program, in partnership with the aboriginal community, to build that capacity, based on western scientific knowledge and the inclusion of traditional ecological knowledge, and begin to work together.
What we did then was begin to set up these BEAHR training programs in partnership with HRSDC. We were guided by an international steering committee that included the largest aboriginal training centre in the United States, because they've done a tremendous job in this activity. They have some 1600 young aboriginal people in undergraduate programs in environmental science and environmental engineering. Last year, this program graduated more environmental scientists and engineers than all universities in the United States combined. It's very significant.
As a result of that program, and after pulling together some 84 environmental employers and some 77 aboriginal organizations, we went to focus groups. We developed from that six training programs. These training programs were based on the national occupational standards for environmental employment, which are indeed the national standards used for employment across Canada. The programs were developed in such a way that there was detailed documentation of the curriculum for both the instructional staff and the students to ensure that delivery could be done across Canada and that the graduates would all have similar capacity, skills, and knowledge once they completed the program.
The BEAHR training program, of course, is designed for work in the environment sector, which we know is cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary. Because of that cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary nature, we know that individuals work in a variety of sectors of the Canadian economy, from mining to natural gas extraction to a variety of other sectors, including things such as pipelines.
The BEAHR training programs are a series of culturally relevant, skills-based, environmental training programs for aboriginal learners: first nations, Métis, and Inuit. They are designed to be short-term, employment-focused, community-based, inclusive of elder participation to bring the traditional ecological knowledge, national in scope, blended with local knowledge, and of course tied to employment.
The prerequisite for these programs is either grade 8 or grade 10, which is typical of some of the education levels found within the community. We developed six workforce training programs, an environmental monitor coordinator, an environmental site assessment assistant, a local environmental coordinator, a contaminated sites remediation coordinator, a solid waste coordinator, and a land-use planning coordinator, as well as two technical training programs, a certificate in applied environmental techniques, and a certificate in environmental planning and administration. These programs ladder to a college diploma, so we're looking at lifelong learning as part of the entire process.
We do not deliver the programming; the programming is delivered by the existing infrastructure of the public sector trainers--that is, college, university, technical institutions, and CEGEPs across the country--or by indigenous groups or by companies or qualified trainers. We have 34 licensed trainers across the country right now, and the program can be delivered in any part of Canada.
To date, we have 1,131 students registered in the program, and we've graduated 895 students, for a graduation rate of 79%, which is quite significant, considering most of these programs are delivered within the community. There is a 71% employment rate at the end of the educational process, with 75% who have been employed by the community, in order to build capacity within the community. It's a 74% success rate if you include those students who went on to further education.
We have offered this program 97 times in Canada to date. We've offered it in all Canadian provinces and territories with the exception of P.E.I., and with the most abundant being offered in northern Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon.
As part of the ECO Canada strategy, we also made a commitment to those young aboriginal Canadians who have made a commitment to us by completing post-secondary education. We have committed 10% of all of our national environmental youth corps funds, and we have placed 67 young aboriginal graduates in long-term employment; further, in a partnership with the Province of Alberta, we have funded a plus-30 internship for aboriginal adults to make that transition into environmental employment.
The second project that we just got involved with some 22 months ago is called the Contaminates Remediation Training Organization of Canada. It's a partnership with HRSDC under the ASEP program and 19 industry aboriginal and academic partners from across the country. The program is appropriately called “Caring for the Land”. It's to enhance the employability of aboriginal Candidates through participation in skills development through meaningful training.
In a very short period of time—22 months and 19 months of training—we have done 45 training programs through 32 industry, aboriginal, and educational partners. Our goal was to do 400 interventions with aboriginal people. To date, we have done 2,483 interventions. Our goal was to assess 700 aboriginal people. We have assessed 1,106 aboriginal people. Our goal was to train 600 people. We have trained 785 people.
The vast majority of the training just ended in January 2012—last month. So far, since February 9, we had committed to 400 employed. We are now at 423. With the training just ending and the majority of this training being in the north—as you can well imagine, this is winter, and therefore not a lot of environmental work is being done outside—we anticipate that the employment rate by March will be about 500, and by May and June it will be approximately 600 employed aboriginal people as a result of this program.
Working with aboriginal communities to develop pathways for meaningful, long-term, environment-related employment is critical to the future of Canada. It is the primary goal of the BEAHR training program.
Thank you.