Business development

Supporting Aboriginal businesses helps our company by ensuring we have the goods and services we need to support our growth projects and existing operations, and it helps Aboriginal communities by fostering entrepreneurship and creating employment in the community.

These are just some of our recent efforts to build our relationship with Aboriginal businesses:

• Regional staff participated in business development workshops in Fort McKay, Alberta, and in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. We also held procurement and safety workshops in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and at the Fort Nelson First Nation.
• We continued to work closely with major contractors for the Kearl project so that they understand our company’s expectations for providing and communicating business opportunities for Aboriginal businesses. Currently, 25 local Aboriginal businesses work on site, representing 46 separate contracts. To date, almost $140 million in contracts have been awarded to local Aboriginal businesses.
• We sponsored a general meeting of the Northeastern Alberta Aboriginal Business Association, a non-profit organization that promotes businesses, jobs and training for Aboriginal people in the Athabasca region.

Cold Lake operations Nabiye expansion
We hosted an Aboriginal Business Open House at the Bonnyville Centennial Centre in Bonnyville, Alberta in June 2009 to allow local Aboriginal people and businesses greater access to business opportunities available at our Nabiye expansion. Attendees at the open house were able to learn about our procurement, contracting and qualification process. Several local contractors, including Flint Energy, Pimee Well Servicing, Pyramid Corporation, Quinn Contracting, Morgan Construction and Environmental and GenMec ACL, also attended to share information and answer questions.