Aboriginal Training Partnerships for Arctic Extractive Industries

• In Event: Education in the North: Challenges in Formal Education for Indigenous Peoples in Circumpolar Regions

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
This panel presentation analyses vocational education and training (VET) partnerships in northern Canada. The case of oil and gas development in the Beaufort Delta, Northwest Territories provides a political, economic, and historical context to frame current efforts to train a skilled workforce as formulated and conceived under public private partnerships that have been negotiated between aboriginal and non-aboriginal governments, and industry. Despite significant federal funding tied to training a skilled aboriginal workforce, aboriginal northerners remain under-represented in the skilled trades, and most employment is gained by a southern peripatetic workforce.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Vocationalization of adult education is conceptualized as a function of colonial relations of dependency and the attendant imperatives of capital accumulation regulated within local historical contexts. The evolution of training partnerships involving large-scale resource extractive industries represents contradictory and contested sites of struggle, producing asymmetrical power relations that impede local capacity to meaningfully participate in future economic developments. Partnerships are therefore conceived as representing “demand driven” corporatist mechanisms rather than “social partnerships” responsive to individual and regional needs (Billett, Ovens, Clemans, & Seddon, 2007). It can therefore be speculated that these structural constraints conspire to socially reproduce inordinately low educational attainment characterizing the aboriginal population of the region.

3&4. Methods, Data Sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
The presentation uses the case of arctic oil and gas development along the Mackenzie Valley corridor, and is organized temporally by two significant pipeline hearings - the “Berger Inquiry” during the 1970s, and on-going efforts to develop the Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP). These benchmarks serve as useful focal points to examine government policy documents related to education, training, and employment. Accompanying these benchmarks is devolution of responsibility at the local level as seen in federally funded training-to-employment programs - notably recent strategies enacted through the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Program (ASEP) and the Aboriginal Skills Employment Training Strategy (ASETS). Annual ASEP “progress reports” are used to examine developmental discourse and to compare projected and actual employment achieved.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
A comparative analysis of the outcome indicators used to gauge success of training programs indicates that current measures are inadequate. “On-the-job” training as a measure of program success fails to indicate actual sustainable employment. As such, socioeconomic indicators used by stakeholder partners to report on program success present limitations to understanding how partnership models may be improved upon through increased accountability to train a local workforce.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Research into the socioeconomic impacts of oil and gas development on local indigenous populations has not kept pace with the unprecedented industrial development occurring in the arctic. As the findings indicate, there is a discrepancy between projections for long term benefits accruing to local populations through education, training, and employment and actual outcomes for local people.

Author

• Andrew Peter Hodgkins, University of Alberta