Robert Hawkins

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the mover of the motion, Mr. Nadli, Member for Deh Cho, for bringing forward this very important motion.

I’ll say I’ve certainly experienced good morels and I can tell you it’s always good to have good morels from time to time.

Sorry, folks, I’m here for 19 minutes, not all week.

On a serious note, it’s always good to see the government honour its commitments with First Nations and this could be a small reminder of how important that is. When you honour a small commitment, it demonstrates your ability to follow through on the big ones. We often hear about...

Thank you. Well, we all know where the money is going because it’s found in a report, that report is tabled, it’s available at the library or on-line. That’s all great information, but is there any follow-up compendium to know how the money was spent and what were the results achieved out of that type of money, because that would have all been part of the application to say I need X amount of dollars and this is what I plan to do with them.

Do we know if they actually did the stuff that they’ve applied for and met the spirit and intent of the application? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Recently, I’ve been informed that an applicant to the Growing Forward Program had received some money, but they used it for holidays and to take people away.

I’d like to ask the Minister of ITI, when we give money to applicants in programs like this, how often are they screened and evaluated in a follow-up process to make sure this doesn’t happen on a regular basis? Thank you.

Thank you. Recently I had someone who applied or wanted to apply for a job, but of course it says, as a must, they have to have a high school diploma, but their 20-plus years of experience didn’t matter because their job was pre-qualified and they were encouraged to apply anyway. Frankly, they had to make a choice at that high school year severely impacts their life. Somebody defined it as it continues to haunt their life because they had to make the choice that was right for them, but they can’t apply.

So perhaps I’ll ask it this way, how does the Minister see someone with 20 years’ experience...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Well, we’re not going to let the Human Resources Minister off that easy because, quite frankly, I don’t think that these goals are being achieved. Often I hear people apply for jobs who have years if not, in some cases, decades of experience, but because they don’t have that actual certification, such as a university degree or a college diploma, they get screened out.

Let’s start off with a simple question by asking the Minister, how often does someone get hired on the principles of they have a university degree, versus the people who’ve brought real life decades of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your generosity there. The Minister says that people follow up, I can provide examples where people don’t follow up on grants and contributions given to individuals where they’ve applied to the department. All I want to know, and I think the public deserves to know right now, is where is this all reported? It’s great we know we can go to, say, group X or business X or NGO X and they got so much money, but we want to know to make sure that they did spend the money as they said they would. So we just need to make sure that that’s the case. That’s the issue...

Thank you. I’ll certainly make sure the Minister receives those particular details, but one of the problems that I’ve seen with the Growing Forward Program is that the department doesn’t do a follow-up evaluation and certainly sort of a measured context as opposed to reporting back to find out how the money was spent and how it was enabled to do more as it always promised.

What type of screening, evaluation monitoring and management of the information and certainly the investment of the money is done by ITI and how is that distributed back to the public? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If it’s difficult for the Minister to answer this question, quite frankly it’s difficult for the public wanting to apply for jobs if we don’t know how they can get opportunities that they rightly can do and they’re being blocked at the front door by this little sticker that says if you don’t have the university degree, don’t apply, if you don’t have the college diploma, don’t apply and in some cases, unfortunately, some people don’t have the high school, but they’ve got the 20-plus years’ experience.

I’m going to ask this question: How is the Minister going to fix this...

Maybe the Minister is starting to grasp the complication behind this particular problem. I’ve got people who have applied with 10, 20 or more years of experience, but they’re screened out and the competition is awarded and they don’t know until after the appeal period is gone, but then again their rights don’t really matter. Of course, they feel they don’t matter because their experience is weighed directly against credentials of the university. So let’s go with this group, and by the way, the footnote I’d like to add is quite often I hear of this complaint, and it’s a good complaint and it...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to support my colleague Mr. Menicoche in this little micro theme day statement here.

Often I hear from people who are trying to apply for jobs and they’re screened out for various reasons, some that make sense and some that just want you to bang your head against the wall. In some cases, we hear they’re screened out and they only get the news long after the job has been awarded and the appeal period is long past. At this point, of course, they have no rights to appeal because they weren’t screened in, and often these people are screened out. Why? Because they didn...