Tom Beaulieu

Public Works and Services will be involved in organizing a construction workshop here in Yellowknife that’s an annual thing. That will be occurring sometime in April. What we will be doing as one of the topics will be discussing the energy efficiency act. Actually, sorry, I believe that’s in the middle of this month is when the date of that workshop will be occurring.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That money has been removed, but it didn’t impact directorate. This was a whole section on pay and benefits that was in Human Resources that moved to Finance, and all the people that were in the management and the whole group from there moved over but it didn’t impact on the directorate specifically.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We would be able to provide that in writing if the committee wished for us to provide that information in writing. We are also looking at creating a field in this report so that… Right now, this concentrates mostly on the vacancy rate. We’re working on creating a field in this report that would indicate overall which the candidates were, either a priority 1, 2 or 3. Just for more clarification, I would like to ask the deputy minister to add to that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As far as an actual retention strategy, I could maybe have the deputy speak to that. Our best tool for retaining people in the public service really is having the work environment that the GNWT has and also the benefits package that we’re able to offer to individuals working in the public service.

We would pay equal attention, department by department, on wishing to retain our staff, and our turnover rate has not increased over the years. In fact, it may have come down just a bit. As far as the retention strategy or retention plan that we have, I will have the deputy...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We made the reductions in training and development. We feel that we followed the processes here. We’ve made the reductions in spite of the fact that we had increases of over $1 million that were forced growth increases. That was the Collective Agreement and the fact that we needed to have individuals working on the next collective bargaining process, we still managed to hold the growth to $688,000 by reducing in other areas such as training and development. So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve reduced by that amount.

So I’m not sure that… Well, I think I am sure that the...

It is indicated when we have job competitions, we ask for individuals to give their priority status for the competition. When we go out to job advertisement, individuals will indicate whether they are a priority 1 candidate, Aboriginal indigenous Northerner; or priority 2, non-Aboriginal indigenous Northerner; or priority 3, not having either of those two statuses. In reality, if an individual was here but did not attain any of those two statuses, they may consider themselves a resident of the NWT but would not achieve either of those two statuses or they would be in the same category as...

Mr. Chair, yes we will.

It is not a surprise. The Member is correct; however, each year on a four-year contract we do add in the Collective Agreement and it’s the increases. If the Member is asking whether we could have reduced programs or reduced in other areas in order to make up for the collective bargaining increases, I think that was something that we wouldn’t consider at this time. We think that departments are right-sized as far as personnel go and that these are the increases to the approved positons in this business plan.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The report that we do on a semi-annual basis indicates the vacancy rate and then breaks down which positions are true vacancies where we are attempting to fill the positions. We have 466 positions where we are actually in the process of recruiting. They are at advertisement or they are at the stage where we are preparing to advertise or they could be in the job offering stage after all of the interview processes have taken place. The vacancy rate, which includes positions that are inactive, positions that are filled by casuals and other positions, positions that have...

Mr. Chair, each department has a health and occupational safety coordinator, but it’s not that individual’s position. It would be a position where a person in the government is responsible for that position. Each department has one. Some of the departments that have maybe more… Some of the positions where we’ve had more incidents for, health and safety would have an actual health and safety occupational coordinator position, but I could maybe add to that by just asking the director to indicate which departments would have their own.