Giant Mine remediation team agrees employment targets ‘unrealistic’

The federal government says Indigenous and northern employment targets for the Giant Mine remediation project are hard to meet because there are not enough northerners who can do the work.

Natalie Plato, deputy director of the project, says its managers agree with the assessment of the Giant Mine Oversight Board – an independent watchdog – that the published employment targets are “unrealistic.”

According to the oversight board’s 2025 annual report, northern employees are supposed to work 55 to 70 percent of the hours available at Giant. For Indigenous employees, the target is 25 to 35 percent.

In 2024-25, northern employees worked 25.5 percent of the available hours. Indigenous employees worked 11 percent.

Plato described the targets – set more than half a decade ago – as “challenging.” She said the project has asked communities and governments to re-evaluate the targets, but “nobody wanted us to do that.”

“We knew they would be a challenge to meet but everyone wanted us to set a challenging target, and we have never met them,” said Plato.

“We don’t think that’s a failure by any stretch of the imagination,” she continued, adding the remediation project is employing northern and Indigenous people. It is “seeing good numbers” in employment, procurement and training, she added.

Remediation of Giant Mine, a toxic former gold mine on the edge of Yellowknife, is expected to cost $4.38 billion and take until at least 2038. The active remediation phase officially began in 2021.

During a project briefing and site tour last Friday, Andrei Torianski, the project’s socio-economics manager, presented data that suggested a slight increase in northern employment over the past five years.

The remediation project’s procurement spend with northern Indigenous businesses went up from $31 million in 2021-22 to $115 million in 2025-26, but decreased from $13 million to $4 million for northern non-Indigenous businesses over the same period. Total procurement spending increased from $74 million to $264 million over five years.

The oversight board’s annual report attributed the increase in procurement in part to joint ventures where non-Indigenous and southern companies form partnerships with Indigenous businesses.

“There’s this underlying idea that Indigenous procurement will result in greater Indigenous employment and we’re not seeing that, simply because that’s really not how the labour market works,” Graeme Clinton, chair of the oversight board, previously told Cabin Radio.

Re-evaluating targets

Torianski said Parsons – the main construction manager and entity responsible for contracting – has two tools to make sure contracts are awarded to Indigenous businesses where possible.

The first is a procurement strategy for Indigenous businesses that states if there is sufficient capacity within the project’s “area of contract,” bidding for contracts is limited to Indigenous businesses in the area.

The other tool is known as “Indigenous opportunities considerations,” which are clauses in contracts that specify minimum levels of Indigenous training, employment and subcontracting, according to a document provided during Friday’s tour. Torianski said every contract involves Indigenous opportunities considerations to varying degrees.

Plato said the remediation project is still working to increase northern and Indigenous employment.

The remediation project is also investing in training, she said, “but when the labour pool is what the labour pool is, other than increasing the labour pool, it’s a challenge.”

Re-evaluating the northern and Indigenous employment targets “is probably the most realistic avenue,” she maintained.

With multiple major projects set to roll out in the NWT – the Mackenzie Valley Highway, Arctic Corridor and Taltson hydro expansion – alongside large-scale defence spending on new infrastructure, Plato said if those projects begin construction, they will further complicate efforts to hit employment targets.

While the remediation project had been following the progress of the major projects, Plato said billions of dollars in planned investment from the Department of National Defence came “out of left field.”

“We can just continue to try to be the employer of choice,” said Plato, while acknowledging recruitment for the remediation project can be difficult because it is seasonal work. She said the project has contacted the NWT’s diamond mines – two out of three mines shut down production this year – to see if some of those workers could work at Giant Mine.

Waste underground ‘always the plan’

In its annual report, the Giant Mine Oversight Board raised concerns about the remediation project’s plan to store more arsenic-contaminated waste underground. Some 237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide dust, created while the mine was operating, is already buried underground at the site.

“We think it’s a bad idea. If you want to take a challenge and make it worse or more difficult or complicated, just put it underground,” said Clinton.

Plato said on Friday that “putting contaminated material in Chamber 15 has always been the plan,” referring to the underground chamber in question.

She said the remediation project thought that work would happen this fall, but weather delays have pushed it to next year.

The oversight board’s main concern with this is that the arsenic-contaminated soil has different properties than the arsenic trioxide dust, requiring new research to understand how to develop a permanent solution for it.

Clinton told Cabin Radio the research program is already struggling to find enough money and has no resources to study the arsenic-contaminated soil.

Plato said the remediation project is working on a sampling plan with the oversight board. She said the project had received no request from the oversight board to renegotiate the environmental agreement that sets out the oversight board’s budget.

The remediation project is offering surplus vehicles to the oversight board to sell for extra research funds, Plato said.

Plato also said freezing Chamber 15 should address the oversight board’s concern about fault lines allowing water to enter the chamber and interact with the arsenic.

Other work happening on site

A new water treatment plant is expected to be operational in April, site engineering manager Patrick Schmidt said. He said some electrical and mechanical work remains and the plant needs to be connected to the site’s communications. Procurement is under way for a facility operator.

Demolition of the mill started in the past two weeks. Plato said preparing the building for demolition took about a year and a half because of arsenic, cyanide and asbestos inside.

As it is torn down, the material is either directed to the on-site landfill or placed in crates to be frozen alongside other contaminated waste.

Drilling to install thermosiphons – the instruments that will freeze the underground chambers, which is still the project’s number-one strategy to keep arsenic trioxide in place – recently began.

The first blasting for an on-site gravel deposit in an old rock pit happened last Friday. Plato said the remediation project had previously acquired most of its gravel from Ace Enterprises.

Plato said a report on recommendations for an apology and compensation to Indigenous communities for the impacts of Giant Mine is being developed and should be released soon.

“Everyone should realize that we’re in year six of 18, so there’s still a lot more work to do,” said Plato, “but based on what we saw today, we saw some really good progress.”