Tom Beaulieu

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to welcome members of a federally appointed arm’s-length panel undertaking a statutory review of the Canada Transportation Act. They are visiting the Northwest Territories this week to gather feedback from Northerners into new federal transportation policy and program development.

The panel will conduct a comprehensive examination of how the act operates as it relates to the economic regulation of transportation.

Mr. Speaker, this is a valuable and unique opportunity for Northerners to provide our perspective on how the transportation system can be leveraged to support...

To give them the authority to hire at the open houses within the Northwest Territories would not really be something that would be necessary. That’s the reason we’re not doing it. We could look at talking to departments that may want to go there and be prepared to look at applicants of certain positions that they may talk about in the open houses. But at this point we find that the departments are being relatively successful in trying to reduce the vacancy rates and do the hiring using the current method of how we are hiring people in the Northwest Territories. For that reason we had not...

We are looking at the hard-to-fill positions, as the Member refers to the open houses in the South. We are looking at jobs that have been vacant for at least 18 months and have been advertised at least two times in the North and still with no success of filling the positions. Now we are trying to develop a team that will go down there and make job offers on the spot in those hard-to-fill positions. In the NWT, our open houses, we’re not dealing with the same group of people. These jobs are not considered hard to fill. We will go through the regular process of the departments working with HR to...

We have been reviewing our vacancies and we have what we consider hard-to-fill positions of around 60 to 65 positions in the GNWT. Although not specifically targeted to those actual jobs, we do have some internship programs the government provides to the various departments, depending on the size of the department, a certain amount of money to get interns, and we provide enough money to have 32 interns in the GNWT. We usually end up filling all of those jobs. We also have a Progressive Experience Program within the student hires. We have 80 of those positions and currently we have 69 of them...

The government starts accepting applications from university students, post-secondary students, any time after December 1st. We run the application phase right up until August 15th, when some of the students are not starting back immediately at the beginning of September. So, we try to coordinate it so the first group who usually finishes university for the year, end of April, we hire a few of the students, a majority of the students then, and we realize there are more students finishing at the end of May and at the end of June. We try to coordinate it so those students are given opportunities...

This bundle that we submitted is four years’ worth of projects. Next year it will be approved, so we would be able to go through the tender process a lot quicker. We have tendered in advance in anticipation of approvals from the federal government. So, at this point, as soon as the approvals come, we would be in a very good position to make the awards. As soon as we get approval we’ll make the awards. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Wednesday, June 3, 2015, I will move that Bill 60, An Act to Amend the Motor Vehicles Act, No. 2, be read for the first time.

The Department of Human Resources works with all of the departments and we are thinking that reducing the vacancy rate is something that will increase the population in the Northwest Territories. I referred earlier on in my response to hard-to-fill positions that where we will be actively trying to hire individuals from the South and giving the people the ability to hire on the spot. In those positions we’re expecting to increase the population by that.

As far as vacancies go, a year ago we had over 1,100, well, 1,175 vacancies six months ago. We’re down to 1,038 vacancies, and today we’re at...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct; there were open houses held across the North, and the idea would be to try to provide information to individuals who are interested in coming to work for the Government of the Northwest Territories. I don’t have the matching amounts for the number of individuals that have come to the open houses and whether or not that resulted in us hiring more individuals as a result of the open houses. I know that it has been a good avenue for disseminating information from Human Resources and several departments that do participate to getting people in the...

Last year we hired 212 students at the GNWT. This year, as I indicated, we have 268 students working, plus pending. So, if you compare it to last year, we are slightly ahead of the number at this point than we were last year.

What we’re doing is we are marketing ourselves in several ways. We have the e-mail messenger that goes out. We have a website. We looked at the human resources centres. We advertise in band offices. We talk to government services officers – we have 19 government service officers – and they are also involved. We have newspaper advertisements, et cetera, as an attempt to try...