Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is an area in which the department has been working very closely with Health and Social Services and Stanton to not only reduce the rapidly growing costs but also to develop our own northern workforce. I think that over the past three years or so this program has been in place we’ve been very successful. Agency nursing fees are down 70 per cent. Projected costs have decreased by about $1.5 million. We do have 422 nurses in the casual nurse float pool. These are further broken out into two categories: a pool to cover the community health nurses and also hospital...

We’ll continue to work in that direction.

Mr. Chair, I just want to make a couple of points. The majority of the employees concur with more time off. That would certainly be something we would look at. I’d like to point out that 58 per cent of our workforce works shift work, in 24-7, 365-day-a-year facilities, so I think in those areas it wouldn’t save us money, because we would have to probably pay more. I guess the other consideration is that for those employees at lower levels of the wage scale who work for the government.... I would think that a rollback of one week’s wages would probably have some implications for them. But I...

Mr. Chair, we have people who work with individuals who are affected. They contact them. They meet with them in the department. They work with them to develop their skills for interviews, resumé writing and so on. They also try to match affected people with jobs and with departments.

Mr. Speaker, I’m glad the Member knows my e-mail address.

Laughter.

Mr. Chair, I want to point out that when it comes to human resource planning, it’s a shared responsibility between the departments and Human Resources. We work with the departments, generally at their request. So we work with a number of departments.

We don’t have any specific standards, because generally we deal with developing plans to address some specific human resource situations.

My understanding is that these four relief workers worked at the Arctic Tern facility in Inuvik.

As I mentioned, it would depend on what kind of jobs we’re advertising for. For jobs that are hard to fill, we normally take whatever we can.

With regard to the potentially affected employees, they would get first priority on the hiring. And with the affirmative action policy we have, that would still apply as well. So I would expect that we would still hire people from the Northwest Territories on that basis.

For the Department of Human Resources, we provided all the Members with a complete breakdown of every position that was funded or unfunded or vacant or filled. With regard to how positions are costed: when positions are filled, people are paid at different step levels. How you cost them for budgeting exercises is within the purview of individual managers. If it’s felt that every position should be budgeted at 100 per cent of the pay scale, well, then, you have people, new hires, who are generally hired at, I don’t know, 65 per cent, 70 per cent.

So all those things have to be taken into...

I’d like to recognize Sheila Laity, Gayla Wick and Paul Goldney, all Yellowknife South constituents.