Tom Beaulieu

I know that the department is up to speed on occupational health and safety of the employees of the public service. If this is something that can be done and something that employees in Human Resources will benefit from, thus benefitting all public servants in the GNWT, then I will speak to the senior management to get their feeling on whether or not they feel it would be beneficial to the staff there to take this course. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to return to item 5, recognition of visitors in the gallery.

---Unanimous consent granted

We have not had a discussion to bring people from outside the public service in to assist us with filling vacant positions. We do have staff in all of the regions. I suppose the first place that we would reach out to, if we wanted to try to come up with some more creative ideas, is maybe to ask the people in our regional office, talk to the citizens out there in the regions and then set something up here to have that discussion. To formalize something and create a committee or a board from outside the public service to consult with, I suppose if the committee members were to want the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We haven’t asked the public to form a body that we’d consult with in filling vacancies, but we do have an internal body, an Aboriginal Advisory Committee that we use to try to utilize Aboriginal employees we have in the system and bring more Aboriginal employees into the system in order to become more representative of the population. But specifically to have gone to an outside group and asked them and consult with them on hiring issues, we have not done that. Thank you.

I think we do recognize that probably if the other two components that usually consist of a regional office, like, a bit of marine and highways operation, along with what is currently in Norman Wells, it would constitute the regional presence. But right now it appears as though we have only the airport presence, and like I indicated, we’re looking into the future and we’re seeing the possibility there for sure. But probably at the time the all-season road is being constructed would be the time that we would start to ramp up for a regional office in the Sahtu. Thank you.

This week we have a new Chipewyan interpreter in the House who I will be recognizing on Friday along with the Pages from Tu Nedhe and also the veteran interpreter. Today I would like to recognize one of the interpreter’s sons, who is a constituent of mine, Rodney Lockhart.

We know that just in general we have very high employment rates here in the city. I would be prepared to deal with the Members, like, the committee. If the Members were to go through committee and ask that we develop something that we could discuss to try to decrease the vacancy rates across the GNWT, we would be prepared to look at that, but I think it has to come from committee.

Thank you. We would look at all of the options that are available to us. Right now how we’re going about filling jobs have been through job sites, internal graduate internships, regional recruitment, expression of interest internally and so on to fill some of the jobs. But we are open to other ideas. If there are people out there that felt that there were better ways for us to recruit to lower the vacancy rate, we’d be open to taking those suggestions. Thank you.

Certainly, DOT is a very decentralized operation. Sixty-nine percent of our staff are in the regions, so we’re sort of equipped to operate out of the regions. It would be something I would certainly look at in the transition document as something that we would be looking to pass on to the next government. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Transportation continuously looks at the possibility of establishing a regional office in the Sahtu, and we recognize that right now they have a full operation at airports in Norman Wells, but they don’t have a full highways operation, which usually the regional office has some marine, some highways – well, a lot of highways – and some airports.

Right now in Norman Wells it’s essentially just an airports operation and then for three months out of the year there’s a winter road operation, a registered winter road. So, we try to move staff in there, into...