Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m pleased to present the Main Estimates for the Department of Human Resources for the fiscal year 2008–2009. The department’s 2008–2009 Main Estimates propose O&M expenditures of $32.253 million. This represents an increase of $662,000, or 2.1 per cent, over the 2007–2008 Main Estimates.

The department has reduced expenditures in areas such as travel, salaries, contracted services, and fees and payments, but the overall budget has grown due to collective agreement adjustments and increases to the cost of medical travel assistance.

The Department of Human Resources Main...

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.