Statements in Debates
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.
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...