Bob McLeod

Our government operates on the basis of merit, so employees that progress through different promotions and different employment opportunities either compete for the jobs and get them on their own merit or if they are direct appointed or on a transfer assignment. It’s based on merit. Senior level positions like deputies and associate deputy ministers, my experience is that the senior management skills are transferrable; that if you’re working with one department, generally you should be able to manage different levels of departments, and we recognize that in our deputy minister cohort where we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government, our greatest resource, our greatest asset is our human resources and it’s very important for us to make sure that we have a qualified public service in order to do all the work that we need them to do.

The Member is correct that our public service is aging. The average age is 44 years old. That’s the average age of our public service. Sixty-three percent of our employees are over 40 years old. Obviously we need to pay a lot of attention to succession planning. Specifically in the senior management category, over the next five years 40 percent of our...

In follow-up to the questioning by the Member, I did ask my Tourism Marketing Advisory Committee to look at ways to provide financial incentives, and in their view they feel that with the discounts that are offered by hotels and airlines and the promotional items that can be provided by local businesses, that that might be sufficient. I like the idea of looking at what the Yukon is doing. We do already provide a certain level of financial incentives through our SEED program. Thank you.

As I’ve indicated many times, the authority for staffing has been delegated down to individual departments, and the majority of competitions are filled through the staffing process and they’re posted on our websites. We are moving to e-Recruit and all of the jobs that we advertise will be on e-Recruit.

With regard to the deputy minister level positions, that is under the authority of the Premier. The Premier decides if he wants to put it out to competition or if he feels that we have sufficient people who are qualified to do it within the public service. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Premier and all of the Ministers on this side, we’ve said that the North has never received as much attention as we’re getting now and certainly we’ve always said that the best way to promote Arctic sovereignty is to have healthy sustainable communities, and that includes building highways and so on, and developing all the business opportunities such as oil and gas. So we are going to be working very hard as a government to ensure that we do create jobs for remote communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we have done a lot of work in this area already but we are prepared to do even more. We committed at the Beaufort-Delta Regional Council that we would host a regional workshop with the members of the community in which we would look at opportunities. We would even look at setting out a plan as what we would need to go forward. We would even go as far as look at creating an inventory of possible jobs or opportunities that could be moved to some of the communities. I don’t know if we have call centres that could be moved or not, but we’re prepared to look at those types of...

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to do that, because one of the things in tourism and parks that we like to do is we like to see people using and enjoying our facilities. We will be pleased to come up with a number and maybe even amend our business plan, if that was at all possible. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We have had a lot of discussion with our clientele, what visitors and campers and people who come to enjoy nature, what their expectations are when they come to utilize a tourism park or facility, and they want to make sure that we have clean facilities, that they have an ability to enjoy nature and the environment, and we cannot do that if we just leave the parks wide open and have no control and no monitoring. We’ve come to learn that we have to have some control in order to make sure that we maintain our facilities and that the people who use the parks can enjoy the facilities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize a long-time friend and colleague, Donald Yukon. We went to high school together. Also a McLeod that my brother’s already beat me to the punch and recognized her. Welcome to the gallery.

In a Territory like ours where we have a large expanse and we have few people, I think we have to take advantage of technologies if we’re going to be able to reduce the cost of living and to create meaningful employment. We’re very prepared to do that as part of our meeting in holding a workshop with the Nunakput people. Thank you.