Top corporate and government leaders from across Canada will gather in Calgary next month for a one-day forum to tackle aboriginal employment issues.
Spearheaded by five companies, including Calgary-based Suncor Energy Inc. and TransCanada Pipelines, the Feb. 6 event at the Hyatt Regency is billed as an unprecedented private-sector effort to increase the participation of aboriginals in the workforce.
“Five corporate presidents from across the country have agreed to come together to be co-chairs of this event. This has never happened before,” says organizer John Kim Bell, a Mohawk conductor and composer from Kahnawake, Que., and founder of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation (NAAF). The foundation provides more than $2 million each year in scholarships and produces the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards.
Bell says the invitation-only event, called Taking Pulse, will help promote discussion among 150 leaders in business, government, education and First Nations representatives, and generate concrete action plans to address career development and training initiatives.
“We don’t want people to say that housing is the issue, or poverty, or fetal alcohol syndrome is the reason why aboriginal people aren’t employed. We know all those special barriers exist,” Bell says. “What we want to do is focus on the solutions.”
The corporate leaders include Suncor president and CEO Rick George, TransCanada Pipelines president and CEO Hal Kvisle, Hewlett-Packard Canada president and CEO Paul Tsaparis, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chairman and CEO John Hunkin and Paul Tellier, president and CEO of Canadian National.
Federal Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault and Jane Stewart, Minister of Human Resources Development Canada, have been invited along with their provincial counterparts.
“We are looking at solutions that will foster relevant, specialized skills that will achieve recognized industry standards and principles,” said Tsaparis. “The solutions will also look at bridging the cultural and systems gaps to enable aboriginal people to realize their full potential.”
Suncor Energy Foundation manager Cathy Glover says her company already has a clear commitment to improving aboriginal employment. Suncor has set a goal to increase full-time employment for aboriginal workers to 12 per cent, to reflect the regional population in northeastern Alberta by the end of 2002. The company has reached a level of 11 per cent, or 225 people.
“Our hope is to come out of Feb. 6 with some new strategies that we can begin to develop and work together with all of the partners, so it’s not just government, just the aboriginal community or just industry,” Glover says. “It’s everybody working together to try and address this issue.
“I think we still need to look at the fact that aboriginals are under-represented in our workforce.”
But it’s important that the private sector understand not all aboriginal people wish to work in rural areas in blue-collar or labour jobs, says the owner of a Calgary staffing agency.
“Some of the feedback we receive from working with the companies is that their commitment is to rural (jobs) versus urban,” says Janice Larocque, manager of Spirit Staffing Inc., which helps unite local businesses with aboriginal job-seekers. “They haven’t really taken the off-reserve people into consideration.”
Companies could blend more aboriginal people into all levels of their operations if they considered technical school graduates with two-year diplomas, rather than just degrees, suggests Larocque.
Bell agrees that many programs designed to help aboriginal people are short-term courses leading to labour jobs, and not middle or senior management positions. While oil companies may be interested in employing those who live near their drilling operations, the majority of Canada’s aboriginal population lives in urban areas due to the lack of opportunities on their home reserves, he says.
Greater industry involvement at the high school level, where many aboriginal students drop out, would help address the problem, says Bell.
“There’s a tremendous need for industry-driven curriculum, which we don’t have in aboriginal schools at this point. There’s a clear gap between the skills resident in the aboriginal community and the requirements of industry employers. “We have to find a way to bridge the supply with the demand,” he says.
The conference will be preceded by a larger NAAF event on Feb. 5 called Blueprint for the Future, a one-day career fair at the TELUS Convention Centre for aboriginal youth.
