Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank the Member for mentioning the best diversity employer. The department appreciates the Member’s comments on that.

On the turnover rates, there has been, from the information we have, a slight decrease between 2011 and 2012 of about a 1.3 percent. On average, we pretty well turn over about 10 percent of our staff on an annual basis, although our average tenure for the public service in the GNWT is nine years, but annually we’re turning over, I would say, about 10 percent, a little under 10 percent and sometimes slightly over 10 percent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to speak on a couple of these items brought forward by the Member, then I’m going to ask the deputy to speak on some specific details. I will ask that she speak specific details on the Youth and Student Strategy and also more elaboration on the career fair.

We do attend other career fairs within the territory, but they are hosted by others. The Department of Education will host career fairs and often when those career fairs are occurring, then Human Resources would come in and piggyback onto their career fair and we would have people there from Human...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The regional recruitment was something that the people from the departments have been talking about at the open houses. We’ve had one open house; we’re expanding to open houses in all the regional centres where we have service offices. We’re going to have two days of open house here to cover the city of Yellowknife and because regional recruitment is the intent of that, the strategy is to fill the regional positions, positions out there in the regions that could be also in the communities. It was not discussed in Ottawa. The career fair in Ottawa was not specifically to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. To my right, Sheila Bassi-Kellett, deputy minister, Department of Human Resources. To my left, Michelle Beard, director of HR, strategic and policy planning, Department of Human Resources.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am pleased to present the Department of Human Resources’ main estimates for fiscal year 2014-15.

The department is proposing an operations expenditure budget of $23.6 million. This is a reduction of $18.5 million for 2013-14, a decrease of 44 percent. This reduction is largely the result of the transfer of employee-specific services such as pay and benefits, including regional roles, Helpdesk and human resources information systems to the Department of Finance. The transfer includes the compensation and benefits for 78 Department of Human Resources staff who are...

I would be pleased to provide that information to the Member within the next couple of days.

The money that will be used to continue to upgrade the road is from the regular maintenance budget. We could look specifically into the access road budget, as well, this coming year since that is all done by proposal. We would look at the Jean Marie road through the DOT Access Road Program as well. But there is no plan that I’m aware of in the immediate future to upgrade it to the regular highway standards that we have on Highway No. 1, for example.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member brings up a lot of really good ideas for us and to add to some of the initiatives that we continue to work on, some of the strategies, some of the frameworks that we put together to bring people, to recruit people and also to retain people. I think some of the ideas would be difficult to do in the GNWT, and I know that the Member only brings that up as an example, but many of these ideas of job shadowing, being creative and innovative and making sure that we have the right jobs out there that can be filled by the individuals out there. Going to high schools...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Workforce Planning Strategy does have several sub-strategies, a Regional Recruitment Strategy being one of them. The Inclusive Recruitment Strategy is another, the Student and Youth Strategy and also the Career Fair Strategy. The area where the Member speaks of where there’s going to be lots of public servants retiring within the next five to 10 years, we have the Knowledge Retention Framework that we’re going to employ to try to retain the knowledge, pass the knowledge on to individuals that would be staying with the GNWT, like perhaps developing some mentorship...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will attempt to respond to some of the information and then have the deputy fill in, the deputy or the director fill in with some of the areas that we may be able to provide more specific details.

I guess to the overtime issue, we don’t have any overtime scheduled in any of our business planning or in the mains, and I guess that is sometimes part of the issue with some of the discussions that have been continuing in the House over the last few days. At some point there are individuals that are not able to come to work, especially in the 24/7 operations of the hospitals...