Debates of February 12, 2014 (day 10)

Thank you very, Minister Beaulieu. Next I have Ms. Bisaro.

Wendy Bisaro

Frame Lake

Thank you, Madam Chair. I, too, have a number of comments, and answers can come later on. I may ask further questions when we get to detail, but I just have some observations and some comments that I’d like make comparing last year to this year and so on.

I’d like to comment, first of all, about the Workforce Planning Strategy. I’m really glad that we have that and that it’s still being worked on. One of the things that we noticed, particularly in the last budget or the budget before that, was the number of retirees. I shouldn’t say number of retirees. The number of employees we have who are close to becoming retirees. We have a large number of very senior employees who are going to be retiring in the next 10 years. I believe that was two years ago. I’d like to know, at some point, from the department on how the Workforce Planning Strategy is dealing with that particular problem. Are we succeeding or do we still have a fairly large bulge of knowledgeable, competent and senior people that we’re going to be losing in the next 10 to 15 or 5 to 15 years?

The accommodating people who are returning to work, I know that the department is working on that. I also know that there are difficulties sometimes with certain individuals when they wish to return to work and for whatever reason a particular department can’t accommodate them or won’t accommodate them. There’s obviously differing opinions between the employee and the department in some cases. I’d like to know how the Department of Human Resources assists another department in accommodating somebody who is returning to work. I think we have an officer who’s doing that, and I’d like to know whether or not that is successful at this point or if the department feels that there needs to be some change made there.

There’s been some comment already about the career fair in Ottawa and the open houses that are being held here in the North, and I guess my question is more to what is the content of the open houses. What are we trying to accomplish with an open house that we maybe could better accomplish with a career fair? I stopped into the career fair because I happened to be in Ottawa and it was really well attended and I think it was an extremely well visited venue, but why are we doing open houses in the South? Should we not also be doing career fairs here? I’d appreciate hearing what the department thinks about that.

One of the things that struck me when I took a quick look at yesterday’s federal budget address and some of the elements of that budget is that there’s going to be a fairly large impact on federal employees’ benefits and benefits of retirees. The public service, I’ve lost the name of the organization that provides us with our benefits, but retirees, for instance, are going to be paying double for their benefits than they are currently. NWT employees are under the same plan, so I would like to know if the department knows at this point or maybe they need to find out, but how are GNWT employees under the same plan as the federal employees and retirees under the same plan as federal employees, how are they going to be affected by these announcements in the federal budget.

WSCC costs were a really big issue a year ago when we discussed the budget, and I would be interested in knowing whether or not we have seen a decrease in our WSCC costs. I know initially there was. We were advised by the previous Minister that there was some decrease in our WSCC costs, but has that continued to go down or have we gone down and we’re now at a plateau.

I’m pleased that we a have a Youth Strategy that the department is working on. I think this was raised in the House within the last few days, but one of the issues that young people have in trying to get hired is they have knowledge in a particular field. They graduate from school but they have no experience, and they’re in a catch-22 because they don’t get hired because they don’t have experience, and if they don’t get hired then they can’t ever get the experience. My question to the department is whether or not you would consider hiring someone with no experience but with the qualifications that you’re looking for and give them a year, six months, a year, two years under, say, a mentorship system or program to gain the experience that is necessary to move them from the very junior position that they’re in up to where the position that we actually have advertised for and need them for.

When people leave our public service, I think we do exit interviews. I would appreciate that being confirmed if we do exit interviews, and if we do, do we have any data on why people are leaving the public service and how is that data used.

There has been a lot of talk about increasing the number of people in the NWT. It was certainly a part of the budget address and there is a plan which the government is going to put forward. I mentioned the other day that there seems to be a disconnect or something, but there seems to be a problem with us hiring some Northerners back. We have Northerners who want to come home, who have the education, who have the skills, and for whatever reason the hiring process seems to get delayed. They give up and they take a job in the south as opposed to coming back here. I don’t know if it’s something that the Department of HR can do something about or if it is something that HR can in some way educate other departments, because I realize generally these things are being done through other departments and HR doesn’t actually do all the hiring. Whatever HR can do to make changes across our system to ensure that when we’ve got a Northerner who’s coming back that we actually smooth the way to hire them as opposed to putting obstacles in place.

Lastly, I must comment on the change that we use in advertising our positions in GNWT. There’s been quite a bit of comment about it in the media and so on, but I am concerned that we’re not reaching the people we need to reach by only advertising on-line or only putting our jobs out on-line. We are advertising in the paper. I appreciate that. But when the ads are in the paper there are no jobs listed. It simply says come and work for the GNWT and references you to a website. That’s fine for people who are computer savvy who are in a jurisdiction where they’ve got easy access to the Internet and fast speeds, but I would think that it’s probably going to affect our residents to a certain extent, certainly in the smaller communities, and some people in the larger centres who are living in a poverty situation and can’t afford Internet. That’s a concern for me. I am concerned that that strategy is going to have a negative impact on our hiring. I think it’s going to affect a small number of people, but I think any time we negatively affect people who might want to come and work for us or we restrict the number of people who might apply for jobs, I think that’s a bad thing.

That’s it. I just have comments, and if answers can come later, I’m all for that. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Beaulieu.

Tom Beaulieu

Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

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 program guidelines that will allow individuals to work with these potential retirees. That is something that we need to do; it’s something that we consider to be a very important part of individuals that are retiring.

We are also developing a harder to recruit framework and refocusing recruitment strategy, bilingual recruitment strategy as well. The question of the career fair in Ottawa versus the open houses that we’re having in the various regional centres, is the career fair we really are targeting some positions that are very specialized and as a result of some devolution transfers over, so a lot of that was targeted at that. But at the same time, we did engage people from the North that do live down there and may be going away.

Addressing some of the other issues, the Member brought forward with difficulty for Northerners to come back. I have talked a bit about the idea of having more career fairs, actually, near where some of our students are going to university and so on, so that the students are aware that the GNWT is available as a potential employer.

The open houses were specifically targeted at bringing people from the Northwest Territories into the public service, so trying to fill the jobs that are available in the GNWT and the jobs that can be filled by Northerners.

The numbers on the workers’ compensation, I guess as we go through the business planning process here as we go through the mains, we can deal with the specific numbers.

In as far as exit surveys for public servants that are leaving the GNWT, the GNWT has stopped doing exit surveys. We would continue exit surveys if we thought that we were gaining a lot of value or some value from them, but as it turns out, most of the exit surveys only was an area for individuals to vent their grievances with the GNWT and tell us specifically what their issues were during their employment with GNWT in many of the cases. Other individuals said they were happy and were leaving the GNWT on a positive note and seemed less interested in doing the exit survey, or exit interviews.

The change in the way we advertise jobs was for a specific reason. When we hire a person into the public service, one of the questions we ask is: How did you know about the job, what made you apply for the job, what medium did you use when you were looking for employment? We found that a very, very low percentage, I think 3 percent of individuals that have come to work for the GNWT had got their ad out of the newspaper. Most people got their information on-line.

Recognizing the fact that some communities don’t have real good Internet, most do, but some still don’t, and also that some individuals don’t have computers, what we’ve done is in areas in a community where there will be a job come out, a job advertisement, there is a fax sent to the community governments where that job could be physically posted, and also in communities where we have government service officers working for the Department of Executive, they are advised of the jobs that are going out in the communities that they represent. I think that’s most of it. So with that, thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much. General comments. Mr. Yakeleya.

Norman Yakeleya

Sahtu

Thank you, Madam Chair. My comments are going to be general and we’ll go through them in the detail. I do want to acknowledge the hard work by the Department of Human Resources to achieve the level of recognition across Canada for the second year in a row. I know there is lots of creativity from the staff members at the department and their efforts are certainly demonstrated by being recognized as an employer to be reckoned with across Canada, even though it’s a small jurisdiction. I want to offer my congratulations for the hard work of the people in that department.

Now, while I am saying that here, I am going to the budget. I have wanted to follow up with some of the comments of my colleagues on this side here in regards to the department.

The communities in the Sahtu, just doing some research here in all levels of education, because that is where this department needs to be somewhat focused on in our small communities. The Minister is making comment to having maximized our northern workforce and filling them with the choice of employer, which would be the government in our small communities. Just seeing the Aurora College 2013-2014 enrollments by campus, community and programs in the Sahtu from Adult Literacy Basic Education to Underground Mining to Observer Communication Training Programs, Heavy Equipment, Bachelor of Education, Business Administration, Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Community Health Representative, Personal Support Workers, a whole bunch. The point is, we have in this year 81 people who have enrolled in one of these programs at one of our three campuses. I wanted to state very clearly and strongly that the department not only go into the Thebacha Campus, the Aurora Campus, the Yellowknife Campus, our regional Aurora College learning centres and present a dynamic presentation to our students as a choice of an employer.

We need to look more strongly at pointing to our campuses and Aurora College and offering the same type of presentations that were done in Ottawa and bring them into our communities and encourage students to get their education, to look at the number of opportunities.

We spoke earlier about the number of vacancies that need to be filled within our government, but also to talk about the uniqueness of recruiting potential employees, recruiting our own people, giving them the first opportunity. That should be our priority: putting our people to work, number one, from our communities.

Earlier this week I talked about the potential graduations just in my region, not the Northwest Territories, just what I have here. Potentially we could be graduating 47 students this year. What are the department’s plans to go into the high schools and look at long-term employment or career opportunities for our graduates? According to the numbers from Education, Culture and Employment, next year we will have 50 potential graduates and the year after, all things going well, we’ll have 59 graduates. Even with a three-year plan, what are we doing – this is just the Sahtu, I’m not talking about other regions – to look at tracking these students? Looking at going into the schools, what vacancies that are hard to fill, give the students an opportunity to say I could become an employee of the Government of the Northwest Territories. More importantly, have the department work with them to improve their potential to get those jobs in the government, encourage them. Work with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to start tracking them. Start tracking the Grade 12s right now. Are they going to the Norman Wells Learning Centre? Are they going to Inuvik? Are they going to Yellowknife? Start tracking them. There are a lot of kids in our small communities.

A few years ago in Colville Lake, I went with one of the board of governors and did a tour with Aurora College. Even in Colville Lake, there’s a young person there in Grade 7 or 8 who wanted to be a nurse or a doctor. We’ve got to use this opportunity and the initiatives I have heard from the Minister. How do we give hope to a young person in Colville Lake and say, yes, you can be a nurse, here’s your opportunity and this is what we can do for you. Start tracking them.

We must inspire and give support to the young people in our communities all across the North and believe in our students.

I need to make mention that there are some unique challenges in our small communities and our large centres that we need to be aware of. The advertisement about using the modern means of communication, sometimes that doesn’t really work. Even in Tulita, the News/North comes out here on Monday. In Tulita, we get it on Thursday or Friday if we’re lucky. So it doesn’t quite jibe. For us, we’re getting the message late.

In Fort Good Hope, only 38 percent of homes have Internet access. That was in 2008. I’m not too sure if that’s been improved. Not everybody can afford Internet access. We have to be somewhat flexible in our communities.

Like my colleague Ms. Bisaro, there are some details I could go into but I will save that for another day. I do want to say that the opportunity for us is now in that the excitement I see around the Aboriginal recruitment senior managers in our regions and communities needs to be strengthened by seeing some results. What is the goal of the department?

In my region, we have the workforce represent the people it’s working for. I want to see that increased. What’s it now in the Sahtu region? What’s the opportunity for some of our managers who now can be offered an opportunity to take on-the-job training to become directors, superintendents, even assistant and deputy ministers? We have to look at that.

There are students in Fort Smith right now who want to do more than just administrative work or fieldwork and we need to encourage our health boards and educational boards to start moving in that direction, provide the opportunities. I’d like to see what type of opportunities. Given the numbers I’ve given you just on enrolment of students in these various post-secondary institutions and our high schools, we need to be very creative and forceful. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. With that we’ll go to Minister Beaulieu.

Tom Beaulieu

Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

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 Resources. We’ve attended one in Inuvik and the next one is in Hay River that Education is putting on. We will be attending that as well.

The Member speaks about the group of kids that are in high school and looking at what they wish to do for their careers. I guess just overall the department wants to achieve the same type of things that the Member speaks of, that we’re interested in having Aboriginal people in senior management positions as well.

We have the Aboriginal Management Development Program which was known for the last couple of years as the Superintendent/Associate Director Program. Now we’re looking at the Aboriginal Management Development Program at the management level, so management level, director level, superintendent level. I would say that at some point moving forward, we would probably look at some development at the ADM level and even the DM level in the future.

So this is something that, as Minister, I will be pursuing and making sure that we stay on task to be able to bring Aboriginal senior managers into the fold.

In the Sahtu we have decent numbers for the positions in these communities. The GNWT has about 280 positions in the Sahtu, recognizing that 60 of them are vacant, not 60 of those ones but of the 280 filled positions and 60 vacant positions, about half of those, so about 30 of those positions we are recruiting for. About 15 of those positions, we will be activating. We consider them positions that are inactive and we will look at deleting those from the books so it doesn’t look like there’s a tremendous amount of vacancies sitting there.

In the Sahtu, the numbers look really good. We are really encouraged by the fact that when we fill the positions… Although it’s very difficult. We can fill these positions and then there will be people leaving, leaving the various departments in the Sahtu as they are right across the territory. This is a number that we work with but we are constantly in the mode of trying to fill positions as a department as we work with the other departments.

With that, Mr. Chairman, with your indulgence, I’d like to ask if the deputy minister could provide a little more detail to the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. We’ll go to Ms. Bassi-Kellett.

Speaker: MS. BASSI-KELLET

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. First of all I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t express gratitude for the acknowledgement for the Top Diversity Employer. We’ve been very thrilled about that, as well, to be acknowledged overall as a government.

We’re very, very aware that what we need to do is really do a lot more work to encourage students and youth into the public service. The public service has a lot of exciting work, despite what my kids may think, and there are a lot of really exciting things that are available and opportunities out there. What we know right now, through our Student and Youth Strategy, is that we need to be really encouraging students and youth, people who have their credentials who return home, to really look at opportunities in the public service.

We have internships right now and what we’ve found is that a one-year internship is a fantastic opportunity for a smart, young person to get in and learn some things, and they share their wisdom and enthusiasm with the departments they work for, but one year often isn’t enough of an experience to put on a resume that will get you in the door for a subsequent interview. So what we’re doing with the Student and Youth Strategy is aggressively looking at expanding internships so that when someone comes back home with their education and their credentials, that we can bring them on for a longer period of time and it’s really going to pave the way for them to really see a lot of great experience about being in the public service, build up their resume and enable them. If they don’t stay in that internship or in that particular area, they’ve built up some good credentials to be able to apply elsewhere, hopefully in the public service and we’ll keep them north.

A big part of our Student and Youth Strategy, as well, includes getting in to young people who are in the high schools. Minister Beaulieu has worked with his colleague, the Minister of Education, around looking at ensuring that we can get in with ECE into schools, into high schools, so that we can show the students the interesting and diverse array of opportunities and job opportunities that exist within the public service, and lay the groundwork for students then to really be aware what courses they need to take to graduate high school, have those courses behind them to get into post-secondary to be able to come back and take advantage of those job opportunities.

We think it’s quite exciting to be able to get young people excited about the opportunities out there. Sometimes people aren’t even aware of what goes on in government and to know that there’s nursing and teaching and wildlife biologists and heavy equipment operators, a huge diversity of things, not just sitting in an office. I think that’s a very important message that we need to deliver a lot more to the young people, so part of our Student and Youth Strategy is collaborating with ECE to make sure we get out and get into the schools to deliver that message about the exciting opportunities that can come.

We see a lot of importance, as well, as we look at not just recruiting into the public service but retaining people. The point that the Member raised about training and developing our existing workforce is something we hold very near and dear. We do know that we have a lot of talent in the GNWT right now. I think Members are quite familiar with our statistic that we do have 32 percent representation of Aboriginal employees within the public service. Frankly, given the competing interests that are out there that there are so many different opportunities for a lot of our smart young people right now, we’re quite pleased to have kept that 32 percent, if I can be a little bit flippant about it. I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be flip on that.

What we do find is there are ways to really want to retain and advance people into the public sector. We know that training and development is a very key part of that, so we’re embarking right now on our leadership development training that we’ve done for a long time, which gives people the generic leadership skills that they need to develop, whether they are in the public sector or elsewhere.

We’re also working on the management series, which is very GNWT-focused, the things that somebody needs to know to be a manager and a senior manager within our government. Really very, very fundamental tips and tools, including managing people, working with the financial system we have, our budgeting system, how to write policy papers, et cetera, et cetera, some very hands-on information that’s very important for our people to have.

We know that right now we do have some good statistics in terms of where we’ve gone as a public service and our growth and our maintenance of a representative public service. We’ve made great strides. We clearly have much more work to do and we’re really working on that.

We know that over the past decade, for example, if we’ve stayed at 32 percent Aboriginal employment overall, we’re very proud to be able to note that the number of Aboriginal employees has increased. So the overall public service has gone up, but we’re employing, over the past 10 years, we can say an increase of almost 330 more Aboriginal people in the GNWT than there were 10 years ago.

We know, as well, that there have been six straight years of increases in the number and percent of senior managers who are Aboriginal in our government, to go from 15 percent six years ago to 20 percent now. That’s the kind of momentum that we really want to try to continue. We know it’s very important to do. As the Minister pointed out, issues and strategies like the Aboriginal Management Development Program are really key on that. As the Minister pointed out, we’ve expanded that beyond the director/superintendent level to also include managers now. We have a lot of work that we’re doing with our Aboriginal Employee Advisory Committee in partnership with them. They give us great advice on things that we need to be doing to make sure that we are able to continue to strive in a number of different ways to ensure that we’re a representative public service. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bassi-Kellett. Moving on with general comments, I have Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. After the last response from Ms. Bassi-Kellett, actually she touched on almost everything that I was thinking about talking about. Hmmm, I don’t have any general comments anymore.

I wasn’t aware of some of the work that she’s referred to that was actually going on in the department. As an MLA, I guess on the front lines of dealing with constituents, you do get a lot of concerns raised by people who think that the system doesn’t work for them in terms of getting into the public service. You get concerns from people who are priority 1 hires, who think that the Affirmative Action Policy did not serve their interests in getting hired for a job. You hear concerns from indigenous non-Aboriginal Northerners who feel like the hiring policies didn’t serve their interests. It seems like what we hear, it sounds like kind of everybody is unhappy.

I think what we need to do is get really innovative, really creative and find ways to match the people who want to work in the public service to the jobs. Some of the things, like I said that Ms. Bassi-Kellett just referred to, like internships, I think those are amazing. If it makes them more effective to extend them from one year to two years, then let’s do that. You know, job shadowing. I’m really interested in the Student and Youth. You know, some of the positions – we joked the other day in committee – that have been vacant in the government, we could have put somebody through university now to fill those positions. But it takes that contact, perhaps even at the high school level, in order to create the awareness of the kinds of careers that are available in the public and then help guide people through the education process so they can ultimately end up where they want to be in a career in the public service at the end of their education. I think that getting into the high schools is a really good idea.

The leadership development, the management services, all of these things are what I classify as creative, innovative programs, ideas, initiatives that serve our purposes. We do have a lot of vacancies and it seems like there are people out there who would like to work, but I think it’s a multi-pronged approach in the sense that I do think we need new people to come to the Northwest Territories. I do think we need to find ways to… It’s a combination of everything. We need to find ways to get our own people from the Northwest Territories involved, as well, and, at the same time, with the backdrop of the representative workforce always as our goal.

I’m encouraged by what I hear. I hope it goes well. I don’t know what to tell people when they say, you know, I’ve gone out, I’ve gone to university, I’ve got an education but I can’t get a job with the government. I don’t know what to say to them. It’s almost like you need an ombudsman or something for those kinds of things, because it’s really difficult.

I know, having been in Cabinet, it’s very difficult for Ministers to get directly involved in personnel issues. A lot of people don’t know that. They think you can go to the Minister and the Minister can just, you know, drill down into wherever the problem is and fix it. No, that’s not the way it goes. Even as MLAs, our hands are kind of tied because we don’t have the inside knowledge or the detailed knowledge of how to advise these people sometimes. Other MLAs must find that, too, that you do have constituents come to you and they say, oh, I’ve been blacklisted, or I can’t get an interview, and they tell you these things and it really is sad, but it’s very hard to ever clearly define these things because a lot of things are wrapped around personnel and interviews and those processes are confidential. Some of the positions are unionized and there’s union involvement in them, as well, so it is kind of a complex field. HR in general is a complex field, especially nowadays, and I think it continues to get more complex.

Let me draw the comparison to what we have in the Department of Health and Social Services with the system navigator where we have issues with medical travel and different issues, and we can actually refer those to somebody. There’s nothing wrong with going to the Minister’s office, but ultimately, at the end of the day, we do know that the Minister, you know… I mean, there’s a point where Cabinet can get involved and there can be direct appointments, and there are policies at a politician’s disposal to deal with things like that, but ultimately, it’s difficult. I don’t know. This is just a suggestion to throw out there.

If there was some way that we could refer those kinds of concerns to a single desk somewhere where people could tell their story, I guess, because you do hear of situations, and it’s impossible to be everywhere and on top of every hiring event. It’s very, very difficult for the department to do that, and sometimes people’s own agendas do probably come in to play. I mean, let’s just say everybody’s human. Maybe there are incidents where that does happen, but it is frustrating when we, as MLAs, hear of those cases and feel kind of like that our hands are tied because we don’t really have access to, really, the detail or what the issue is.

I’ll just leave it there. Those are my general comments, but just to underscore that we need to be creative. I guess, when I started off in this government, nepotism was a horrible word. You know, hiring friends and family, that was awful, but it is a small territory. I used the example in committee one day of a private company that I know of who were struggling with labour market challenges, and they looked at the children of their existing employees and said why don’t we have a loyalty program and why don’t we target that critical mass of people and why don’t we have a loyalty hiring policy so that the children of our employees can work for our company too? Now, I know you can’t do that in the government, but I’m just saying that there are ways to get creative about hiring Northerners and networking and people who know people who are qualified to do these jobs, and to get that population up where the Minister of Finance wants it and increase it by 2,000 people. We’ve got lots of challenges ahead of us, but I’ll just leave it at that. Thank you. Those are my general comments.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. We’ll go to Minister Beaulieu.

Tom Beaulieu

Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh

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 and stuff like that and working on career development opportunities is one of the things that we will be working on with the various departments.

I am going to ask for some other detail. If I could ask the deputy to provide a little more detail on some of the other stuff that we’re working on.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Ms. Bassi-Kellett.

Speaker: MS. BASSI-KELLETT

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate where the Member is coming from, and I think that that’s a really good observation that we need to be innovative and fresh and have a multi-pronged approach to attract as many people as we can to really continue that theme of diversity in our workforce. We’re looking for a lot of different kinds of talent, and we’re going to get that by looking at Northerners, looking at long-term Northerners, looking at people who are northern residents, looking at people from outside of the territory, and I think it’s a really good observation.

That was really a big part of the career fair when we went to Ottawa, was focusing primarily on devolution but also making the point to a southern audience that, frankly, in Ottawa, understands government, that we are a great employer, and we heard that from a lot of the people that showed up there and are very interested in coming north. So we were very heartened by the over 650 people that came to talk to us about it.

At the same time, though, the career fairs or the open houses, we are deliberately calling them open houses in the North to make them as welcoming as we possibly can, because we do hear from a lot of Northerners, we hear from people that come through yourselves, forwarded on to the Minister, that sometimes the world of HR can be very intimidating. It can be a scary process to think about applying for a job. It’s a little overwhelming. It’s part of the reason why we put some tips and tools onto our careers website about how to apply to the GNWT system, how to do your resume up, some tips and tools to prepare for an interview. Those are great tools on-line, but part of having these open houses is to be very comfortable and casual, encourage people to come and talk about, you know, I have thought about applying but I have just felt like it was a little bit overwhelming, a little bit much. So to be able to come in and talk about the opportunities we have, the processes we have, things that may open up, summer student employment opportunities as they arise, for parents right now or, when the time comes, for young people as well. They are very deliberately called open houses so as to make them as welcoming as possible and to remove any of the feelings that people can have when applying for a job that it can be quite intimidating and quite a daunting process. We are trying to make it as friendly as possible and give as much support to our Northerners as we possibly can.

The point about getting into high schools, I couldn’t agree more. We are very, very keen on that. We are starting that process now with our Student and Youth Strategy and really making sure that we are able to support young people to be able to think about what choices they need to make now to be able to take advantage of good careers in the future.

The issue on the system navigator is very, very interesting. It’s a very interesting one for us that we try to be very precise around giving the terms of employment that we have negotiated with our partners, with the UNW and the NWT Teachers’ Association. We have some very clear rules for engagement that we have worked with them on. For example, if an applicant applies for a job and they are screened in and are interviewed and they end up getting a regret saying I’m really sorry, you did a good job but, unfortunately, we are not going to be offering the job to you. That can be an upsetting thing and we totally appreciate that that can be a difficult thing for many people. The process that is in place right now for people that have applied in a situation like that is to appeal the job. We really welcome appeals. It’s an independent process that’s outside of the Department of HR, it’s outside of government and it’s a process by which, when people feel that something didn’t go right, something was overlooked, something didn’t go right, there is an opportunity for this independent level of review.

At the same time, we’re really trying to make sure that we are as welcoming as possible to any other potential applicant out there to pick up the phone and call us and say, if I went through the interview process and I didn’t get the job, what happened, where was I, did I bomb the interview, did I get nervous, did something happen, did I not answer a question well. To be able to give that feedback, as well, we really welcome the opportunity to do that, to set someone up to be successful the next time around, because we feel that’s a really important part when we do have talented Northerners here that are looking for work with the GNWT. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bassi-Kellett. Moving on with general comments, I have Mr. Hawkins.

Robert Hawkins

Yellowknife Centre

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move that we report progress.

---Carried

Before we rise and report progress I would like to thank our guest today, Ms. Bassi-Kellet, for joining us today. If I could get the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort our witnesses out of the Chamber.

Report of Committee of the Whole

Speaker: MR. SPEAKER

Can I have the report of Committee of the Whole, Mr. Dolynny.