Northern College gets boost to expand

With exciting new developments in northern Ontario, one college will receive a boost of $8 million to accommodate their opportunities. Northern College, the revered choice of students in Ontario's far north, provides important post-secondary training, along with a special focus on Aboriginal programs.
With the newly discovered diamond mines, a resurging forestry industry, and the Five Nations Energy project, the government came to a decision to invest in the future. With $8 million to work with, the future most certainly looks bright.
"It's something we've been working on for a long time, and we're really happy of course that the Ministry allocated the resources for it," explained Michael Hill, the President of Northern College.
"We have been working with the James Bay Coast and the First Nations communities up there for a lot of years now and one of our frustrations is been that we haven't been able to do as much skills training, trades training and getting enough apprenticeships going as soon as we wanted to."
"We've made an application now, about four and a half years ago and have been making the pitch ever since so we've finally succeeded in getting them to allocate resources so that we can do some top-quality training in the trades particularly in skills for the Cree folk up on the coast."
Hill went on to express why this windfall was so important.
"The way I always look at it is the people of the region are the owners of the college and so we work in service to them. And although I think it's best they speak for themselves; what I understand to be true is we need to make sure that the people of the region get a chance at the jobs that are arriving as a function of the new economic initiatives that are happening up the coast, and that means that we've got to make some skills and credentials available to them."
Obviously the diamond mine is the perceived golden goose, however, Hill mentioned that there are at least two other big initiatives looming; one of them being the forestry industry, and the other a new energy project.
"Forestry is trying to reinvent itself, I guess across the country; certainly in this region so we've got to help with that and a big part of is some new training and education opportunities, and so yeah that's a very big part of that. Another one that's particular to our region is there's an energy project, a Five Nations energy project that's looking at the whole issue of energy delivery along the coast of James Bay on the west, and so that's something that's coming and we've got to be training for it now in order to be able to make sure that people of the region get access to the jobs that are going to be made available because of it."
Five Nations Energy Inc. (FNEI) is the corporation behind the Omushkego Ishkotayo project (Western James Bay Transmission Line project), a 270 km long transmission line that services the remote First Nation communities of Attawapiskat, Fort Albany, and Kashechewan. Attawapiskat Power Corp., Fort Albany Power Corp. and Kashechewan Power Corporation own Five Nations Energy Inc. equally.
Northern College will invest the $8-million in building the Nor Tech Trade Centre for Trades and Technology. The Centre will include Wi-Fi labs and state of the art classrooms with projectors and wireless hotspots. Also, satellite trade centres will be built at their Moosonee campus. Furthermore, the school will be able to accept an additional 120 new students every year.
Hill thought it was 'fantastic' that they can accept that many students, but also confessed he is ambitious to try and get more.
He also illustrated the major benefits of the trade centres.
"It's a mix of both trade centers in a traditional sense at a campus here in Timmons as well as us building the capacity at our campus in Moosonee."
"Plus what we've done is we've changed the model for delivery of the curriculum so that people can spend most of their time in their home communities doing their studies. There's a minimal amount of time for them to come out and access the equipment in the shops."
"Basically we're working from the strategy of delivering the education where people live rather than asking them to come to us. So we're developing some capacity to offer trades training up in our Moosonee camp that we didn't have before, and we're also going to be opening up some new trades training here in the Timmons campus."
"We've set up a model where a lot of the curriculum is delivered up on the coast and then they may come down for a few weeks for intensive shop and lab stuff."
The money comes from the Ontario governments $1.5-billion Skills to Jobs Action Plan. Northern College expects to be completed with the new developments in Sept. 2010.