Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the department responds to comments, suggestions and criticisms that may come from non-government agencies or from standing committees of this House or Members of this House by checking to see whether or not the policies need to be revised or reviewed. So there is a constant process of examination to see whether or not the process that we undertake in the income support field is proper and adequate. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Could I have the question restated, please?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I expect that within a matter of weeks, the report, or at least the first draft of the report, will be delivered to my department and I would expect that we would start to -- if there are recommendations for approval -- act on this fairly quickly. It is not our intention, because if you want people to be able to respond openly and freely to this, they have to know that the information they are giving us is going to be kept confidential. There is no intention to release this report, otherwise you put people at risk for not feeling that they can freely participate in the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I said, we have been trying to take advantage secondments to learn from other people. Yes, we have continuous training going on. We have people who work within the Department of Justice to help the staff in all of our facilities develop their skills so that they are better managers. Yes, we are working with staff to try and improve the jobs that they do. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Ms. Lee talked about 12 vacancies. The only time we had 12 vacancies was almost a year ago, November 2003. At the end of September, there were seven vacancies and, as I said, we had 12 officers start training on the 4th of October. So I think that the issue of vacancies is one that is being dealt with. We’ve increased the numbers of positions with the staffing of the North Slave Correctional Centre. It takes a bigger staff complement to run that facility than it did the old facility. So I would argue that the movement is in the right direction. We are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, perhaps I could talk to the Minister of Education about this.

---Laughter

The Department of Justice used to offer a Legal Interpreters Program. In 1995 the program was ended and Aurora College took over offering the certification program. The program was set at one year and part of it included legal interpretation and health interpretation to help make sure that interpreters and translators could deal with the increasingly complex world today that we live in. Unfortunately, over the years the enrollment in that program has declined to such an extent that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The review is one that was requested by the department. They approached corporate human resources and asked if they could get some assistance to do an internal review. So it’s our staff along with one representative from corporate human resources assisting them to make sure they’re examining our human resources policies and practices, as said, to identify strengths and weaknesses and to make recommendations to build on our strengths and if they find weaknesses, to recommend where we might make changes within to address those weaknesses. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have to honestly say I don’t know whether that’s possible. It would seem a reasonable approach if that person was available and if they could provide the service to the courts, but they may have other job-related duties. I’ll have to look into that and get back to the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I indicated previously, corrections did try to staff up for the move. Unfortunately, the process, as it works in government, is sometimes time consuming to fill positions and they were not able to fill those positions prior to the move. That alone led to an increase in the use of overtime, as well as the increased numbers in staffing at the facility. The intention would have been to run another competition sooner had we been able to fill the positions, but because of the length of time the first one took, we’ve gotten behind. Why wasn’t staffing done...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to contact the courts and see what sorts of information we can put together. I can’t promise it for tomorrow, but I could let the Member know within the next 24 hours how long it will take us to put the information together that we can get. I would be pleased to present that information.