David Ramsay

Mr. Chairman, I’m just wondering if the department’s done any analysis on what I would consider a growing problem, and that is stress leave and extended medical leave by employees, and whether you can trace some of this stress leave or extended medical leave back to departments. If we can correlate the use of stress leave and medical leave back to some departments, I think we need to examine the root causes of employees needing extended periods of time away from work.

I find this type of leave being more and more necessary, and employees having to go to doctors and get doctors’ certificates for...

Mr. Chairman, I’m not talking about actual vacant positions. I’m talking about unfunded positions that actually have bodies, warm bodies, in positions that are unfunded. There’s nothing on the books for these positions, yet they exist and they have people in them. Like I said, there are 26 at Stanton. I’m wondering if the Minister knows how many positions are like that throughout the government’s workforce.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple of questions on this section. The first question is: where are we at in terms of the development of a comprehensive human resource strategy government-wide?

I think HR should be the lead department in this, for obvious reasons. I don’t think departments should be going off and haphazardly adding positions in areas of our operation. If we don’t have a comprehensive human resource plan, we don’t know whether or not we should be hiring more people in the social-envelope areas, or policy analysts in offices in downtown Yellowknife. We haven’t gotten to that...

Mr. Speaker, the problems at that hospital have been around for a number of years, going back eight years now. I don’t know how waving a magic wand and getting a public administrator in there for three months is going to address the problems.

There are some serious issues with management and the operation of that hospital that need to be addressed, and they haven’t been addressed to date. I’d like to ask the Minister: what are the plans to address the management at that hospital? That, to me, is where the problems lie.

Thank you. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. It gets back, again, to what I talked about yesterday and what I had mentioned earlier in my Member’s statement. That’s the fact that FMBS has been paying the payroll at Stanton Territorial Hospital for the past six months, and they’re into FMBS now to the tune of over $20 million.

I’d like to ask the Minister — and the alarm bells should be going off for somebody somewhere if this is the case, and it looks like it is: does the Minister know what the hospital is doing with the $4 million to $4.5...

Mr. Chairman, I’d like to thank the Minister for that and would encourage him to keep the dialogue going with the UNW and the other unions to ensure that grievances are dealt with in a timely fashion.

I’d like to ask the Minister: are there guidelines in place for dealing with grievances? Is there a policy where you would deem two years an excessive length of time for folks to wait to get a grievance dealt with? Should we set up at least some guidelines or some standards that we judge ourselves by? Are there any in place already?

Mr. Chairman, just because an employee accesses stress leave or other leave doesn’t necessarily make them a bad employee, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that. I think in many cases it’s bad management, and it’s the employee feeling victimized in the workplace or harassed or intimidated or whatever you want. There are many reasons employees seek stress leave and extended medical leave.

I also wanted to ask the Minister…. If that type of analysis hasn’t been done, I think that’d be something worth providing to Members of this House — which departments have more employees who have accessed...

Mr. Chairman, that’s information I could get a later time. If the Minister doesn’t have that at his disposal, that’s fine.

One other thing before I go — I’ve got a minute left. I just wanted to touch on the Hackett Report. One thing that was contained in the Hackett Report was…. When they looked at the business processes at the Department of Human Resources, one of the things that stuck out for me was, in an organization comparable in size to the GNWT they would need four times fewer employees to deliver services to the workforce. That always stuck in my mind. If a comparable-sized organization...

Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for that. I think it is only a matter of time before the aboriginal governments that are out there, and the ones that are going to settle land claims, begin drawing down their authorities and powers under the land claim agreements.

Any work the Government of the Northwest Territories can do at the onset, and that’s today…. If there’s some work already been done…. I think the more work we do in this regard, the better off we’ll be tomorrow in an effort to save us resources.

And that’s just the thing, Mr. Chairman: resources are scarce. In a territory the size of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my knowledge, there was a public administrator there over the past number of years. I’d like to ask the question: what were the former public administrators doing, and what was the CEO doing? Why do we have to get another public administrator in there again to tell us what’s going on when we know what the problems are? It’s in management, and we have to take care of that. Can I ask the Minister that?