Maybe NOT et al will sign on with this new lab in Thunder Bay.

 Job opportunities are coming and they are coming quick.

Just two months after buying the Moffat Hangar at the Thunder Bay Airport, Activation Laboratories Ltd. (ACTLABS) started operations at their new assay lab.

“These are 60 jobs today. . . . We need to move as quickly as we can to get people trained to (move into the mining sector),” said Minister of Northern Development and Mines, Michael Gravelle in an interview on Friday.

ACTLABS bought the property from Confederation College, which had not used the former Aviation Centre of Excellence building in five years.

Money from the sale of the hangar is set to support existing and new mining-based programs offered at the college. ACTLABS has agreed to provide expertise and advice to improve the college‘s mining techniques program as well as for development of other programs to come like a possible core drilling program based in Greenstone.

Gravelle said the quick arrival of ACTLABS‘s estimated $1.2-million venture is exciting but has produced a challenge. He said getting people trained for the 60 available jobs, which range from positions for chemists to labourers, needs to happen fast.

“We‘re working very closely with (the college) . . . it is all happening very quickly but those jobs are there and we are trying to move as quickly as we can . . . to make sure that the skilled trades people are there,” said Gravelle.

President and founder of ACTLABS, Eric Hoffman said after just two days of advertising in the Thunder Bay newspaper his company has already had inquiries from ten times more applicants than they are used to for jobs posted in southern Ontario.

He said he hopes to have employees in place and be fully operational by early May.

“This is an exciting time, particularly for an economy that has been struggling so much in the past four years with the forestry sector having some real challenges, so it is great news,” said Gravelle.

Hoffman said he has had requests to open labs all over the world but recent discoveries of copper-nickel and platinum metal deposits in Northwestern Ontario lead him to believe that Northwestern Ontario is the right place to expand.