De Beers job ad 'requiring' Yellowknife residency irks Hay River councillor

De Beers Canada is being criticized for a recent job posting for underground miners to work at its Snap Lake diamond mine that said applicants must live in Yellowknife.

The vacancy advertised on its website is for 20 underground miners and the first requirement says "residency in Yellowknife, N.W.T., is mandatory."

Tom Ormsby, a spokesperson with De Beers, says the jobs are actually open to anyone living in the Northwest Territories.

"When we've got interest outside of the territories, sometimes we have to put a reference point in and sometimes we just use Yellowknife as that reference point, but it's open to actually anyone from the N.W.T."

He said the company is trying to boost the number of workers at the mine who are Northwest Territories residents.

But Vince McKay, Hay River town councillor, says the ad's wording could discourage people from elsewhere in the territory from applying.

"You get the PR people of the mine saying 'We're attracting [a] workforce from the North. That's our job, that's our mandate.' But then you get the people that aren't in on the communication of that ... going 'We're putting in this posting that you have to reside in Yellowknife.' 

And that's the left hand not talking to the right hand. They're not communicating." 

Ormsby says other ads the company puts out has "Northwest Territories" as a residency requirement. He says one of Snap Lake's senior managers lives in Hay River.