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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
This is one opportunity Colin Miller wasn't going to flush down the drain.

Colin Miller uses a tri-stand to work on a pipe with his lead pipe wrench, Tuesday while at Independent Electric. - Simon Whitehouse/NNSL photo

The 21-year-old plumber at J & R Mechanical leaves today for the second ever World Skills Americas competition in Sao Paulo, Brazil as a member of the Skills Canada National team.

As the only NWT competitor on the 12-member national roster, Miller will take part in a four-day event that will see him applying his plumbing skills in an Olympic-style setting. The event is to be held in Sao Paulo's Parque Anhembi Exhibition Centre where Miller will be among more than 800 competitors from 31 different countries and regions from across the Americas, according to the Skills Canada website. Of those events, 23 are expected to involve plumbing.

Jan Fullerton, executive director of Skills Canada NWT, said Miller's involvement will be a rare chance for NWT youth to showcase the territory's skill level in trades. The event will also be a good opportunity to promote trades like plumbing, which suffer chronic labour shortages.

“From the youth perspective and from working in the NWT with youth on a regular basis, sometimes the youth sell themselves short and don't necessarily believe that the NWT has the ability to compete on the international stage and I find that very frustrating,” said Fullerton.

“We are a fairly strong resource economy, and because of that the trades tend to be fairly integral to our Northern economy and Northern industries. I think the NWT has a strong skills base that we want to celebrate. By participating in these types of competitions, it gives us a chance to profile and draw attention to the value of these careers and skill trades and technology.”

For Miller, the chance to travel will allow him to broaden his own horizons by seeing how plumbing is done in a different parts of the world and give him insight into how other cultures live, he said.

“It is going to be interesting to see how things are done down there,” he said of the competition.

“Not so much just in the trade sense but also how people live down there. I have heard that Brazil is a very cultural place and it will be interesting to see how everybody does things down there.”

He was notified three months ago that he was wanted on the team. Since then, he has been preparing by learning about how plumbing is done in Brazil.

“It will be a learning experience and I have learned a lot preparing for it,” he said. “Instead where we use threaded fittings for a steel pipe, for example, (in Brazil) they will bend their pipe and weld it. That is something we would never do up here. ”

He said he has also studied up on the types of water and drainage piping that are used in Brazil,

“Some things we haven't used up here for a long time,” he noted.

Miller has not yet received technical training in a post-secondary school for plumbing, which makes his participation that much more unique. But he pointed out he has had lots of exposure to the trade and has put in two and a half years worth of apprentice hours with J & R Mechanical.

“It is a family business that I have been working for for two and a half years, but I have been around it for most of my life,” he said. His father Ken, a part-owner with J & R, is training Colin for the competition and will be travelling with him.

Miller showed his strong ability in plumbing by placing gold at the territorials skills competition in plumbing at Sir John Franklin High School last April. He then qualified for the national competition in Edmonton in May and placed fourth -- a finish strong enough to be chosen to travel to Brazil.

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