VANCOUVER—The $40-billion LNG Canada project in Kitimat has publicly committed to using a “hire local first” policy when awarding contracts, as its guarantee of jobs for Canadians was one of the conditions for its approval.

Four months after construction on Canada’s largest-ever private project began, the company has no public details of what it will entail. What is known, however, is that it doesn’t include specific targets or quotas to hire Canadian workers.

That’s according to a statement from LNG Canada, sent in response to requests from StarMetro Vancouver.

Since construction began last October, the company — a joint venture of Shell, Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and Kogas — has indirectly employed 505 people, including 270 from the local area. The company says it will employ 10,000 Canadians over the project’s lifetime, a number greater than the 4,500 to 7,500 jobs it initially said would be needed in proposals to the government.

The planned export facility will be able to send liquified natural gas from Kitimat to Japan in roughly eight days instead of 20 days from the U.S. Gulf.

“We are not envisioning the need to employ workers from outside Canada,” reads a portion of the company’s response.

“This commitment is shared by our engineering, procurement and construction contractor and subcontractors, who are required to report on a monthly basis their progress toward achieving local hiring.”

A spokesperson from the province’s ministry of energy, mines and petroleum resources reiterated that LNG Canada has a “hire local first” policy, but did not respond to questions about whether the company has a formal commitment with the province.

There is a precedent for such a written agreement, which also involves another major industrial project in Kitimat. The employers and unions on the 2010-2015 Rio Tinto smelter modernization project released a 300-page labour agreement in 2008 stating the expectation that locals would be hired first, then British Columbians, then other Canadians.

A labour-relations expert who worked on that project said it helped ensure the company hired Canadian workers: 75 per cent were British Columbian and another 24 per cent came from the rest of Canada.

“The parties need to be totally transparent in the objectives, the performance of the personnel that they want to get involved, all of those things,” said Tony Fanelli, now executive director of the Construction Labour Relations Association of Ontario. “The transparency has to start from the very beginning of the project.”

Hiring Canadians for all the jobs may prove difficult for LNG Canada. The country is going through a construction labour shortage that sets a 10-year record. And Fanelli believes on a project the size of the LNG Canada plant, there will “absolutely” be gaps in the Canadian labour market that will need to be filled by foreign workers.

Part of LNG Canada’s plan to ensure a pool of skilled workers is a $2-million local training fund that started in 2015.

Without detailed policies on the public record, it’s not clear what hiring procedures LNG Canada will follow — for example, opening up contract bids to First Nations and Northern B.C. companies before the rest of the country.

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StarMetro Vancouver requested copies of LNG Canada’s agreements with First Nations and unions, as well as Contract Local Implementation Plans outlining hiring parameters. Patti Schom-Moffatt, a communications strategist working as LNG Canada’s media contact, declined to send them, saying the agreements are “commercially sensitive.”

The Star asked LNG Canada whether it has a plan for a project labour agreement, but the company said it forwarded the question to its prime contractor and had not heard back by press time.

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