The head of an Aboriginal jobs training program says after some hurdles the organization is happy it was able to secure federal funding in the end.
There was some doubt whether the Northern Career Quest program, which trains Aboriginal people for key jobs in northern Saskatchewan’s mining sector, would be able to carry on after the program was unable to secure federal funding late last year.
Nevertheless, the organization’s CEO Steve Innes says in the end it was just a matter of working through the right government channels and applying under a different program – the Skilled Partnership Fund – to gain access to the much needed federal dollars.
“When you apply to Ottawa, quite often you are dealing with bureaucrats and folks like me, fairly low level folks,” he says. “So quite often it is not the larger level folks making decisions early in the process.”
Innes adds Northern Career Quest had originally applied for federal funding under the Skilled Partnership Initiatives program but was turned down.
He says the current job-training program – which consists of about $17 million in federal, provincial and industry funding – will wrap up in March 2015.
The Northern Career Quest CEO says the previous $33 million program ran from 2008 to 2011.
The federal government and province announced close to $10 million in new funding yesterday for the job-training program.