Bob McLeod

The Department of Human Resources was involved in the discussions with the other departments. It was not a requirement for HR to give their stamp of approval on any proposed reductions.

I’m not sure what letters the Member’s referring to, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Speaker, generally, we encourage employees to take the pre-retirement training earlier in their careers rather than a year or six months before the time to retire, and generally, we pay for one pre-retirement training course per employee.

Mr. Chair, this is an area that’s, I guess, a difficult one to deal with, because you would expect that, for not only aboriginal people but also for Northerners, they would get educated through the education system and then they would be able to get a job with the government and work their way up through the ranks.

But my experience with the civil service is that if you want to get aboriginal people into senior management or management, you have to take extra steps, because not everybody wants to go into management. If they want to go back to school…. Most of them have families, and so you have...

That were seven additional that were not accepted.

We can provide that information. I think the Member should be aware that as a government we go through a regular exercise of trying to stay on top of the unfilled, vacant positions. Some are set up for administrative reasons. It's an issue that we have to constantly update.

We have pension specialists within the Department of Human Resources who are available to assist. Also, all employees are encouraged to take pre-retirement training programs through their department.

Mr. Chairman, as a government, the Affirmative Action Policy is still in place. We followed all of the aspects of the Affirmative Action Policy. Of the potentially affected employees, the majority of those were non-aboriginal employees. Conversely, when we were looking to reassign potentially affected employees, we applied Affirmative Action Policy so that if there are two people of equal skills and experience, that position would be offered to a P1 candidate.

Yes, there were some positions that were put forward from the regions, but they were not accepted for reductions.

Part of the explanation is that when HR was amalgamated, HR wasn’t allowed to lay anybody off. So, as such, we had more people.

I think the Member has to understand that just because you have positions, it doesn’t mean that those positions are funded. We are funded for 167 positions, and there are 37 vacant, unfunded positions, so there are positions on the books, but there’s no money or resources attached to them.