Bob McLeod

Mr. Chairman, all of these scenarios that the Member refers to we deal with on the basis of a merit principle. As such, that guides the staffing approach that is taken, and it guides our staff retention and any provisions for layoff. The senior managers of departments have delegated authorities.

If there are specific instances that the Member is aware of where staff weren't dealt with properly or were mistreated, then we certainly would look into it. But I'm not aware of any of those circumstances.

That’s correct.

We are funded for 167 positions. So at various times, people that are on leave without pay or what have you — we have to fill in behind them. So that’s how we would do it. We are expected to come in under budget or within budget.

We would ensure that the different aspects of staff retention and layoffs were adhered to, and proper notification and so on.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess we’ve been looking at it from a number of different ways. I don’t want to go back in history, but we do have the Hackett report, where we looked at all of the areas we were functioning in to see what we could improve on.

We’ve also looked at self-servicing. I guess we see that as a way to improve services to reduce the number of people we need to do the job. We’re finding that we’re having to run competitions quite a few times in order to be able to attract people to come to work for the Government of the Northwest Territories.

This is an area we’re looking at, that...

There would be 167 funded positions.

Mr. Chair, it was up to the individual departments to determine the best approach and identify potential reductions for review at Cabinet level.

Mr. Chair, I guess the best way to respond to that is that I think the number of positions at headquarters goes up and down depending on the staff that we have at the regional level. As much as possible, we like to have the services provided at the regional level, but on occasion we have staff who leave, and it takes some time to replace them, so that has impact on the headquarters level. As far as the reductions go, I think the approach that we took, our first cut at it, was to look at the vacant positions that we had in the department. That’s how we approached it.

Our experience with the staff retention policy is that if there’s no suitable job for an individual in their home community, they could look at jobs in other locations if they’re mobile and willing to move.

I guess I should have been more specific. The $628,000 is part of HR; $270,000 is the part that’s here in the directory. The remainder is in HR strategy and policy.