If the Minister is going to continue to encourage, I must ask him, what has he done in the past six months in terms of encouraging the AANDC Minister? Can he give me some details, please?
We’ve been working through the process and making sure everything is done. We’ve been working with the staff to encourage them to do that and we will continue to do that and move it up to the ministerial level. Thank you.
That doesn’t give me very much comfort. I know you’re working with staff, you’re doing this, doing that, but what does “encouraging” mean?
Can the Minister give me more detail? When he talks to the AANDC Minister, just what does he do to encourage the Minister to make a decision? Thank you.
It’s a federal site. The federal government moves at its own pace and we’ve seen that across the board. In this case, they have yet to respond, and we will do what we can to encourage them to carry out and conclude a response on this issue. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. The Minister is much closer to the Minister of AANDC than the other Members here in the House and the general public, so I’d like to know if the Minister can tell me when he might expect a decision. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, there are projected timelines, as the Member pointed out. Depending on when you start counting the five months, it could be this month, it could be in another couple months. We’re going to encourage them to get the response out sooner rather than later. That’s all I can tell the Member at this point. The federal Minister marches to his own drum. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Recently, in April, there was a day designated as Autism Awareness Day. I do know of parents who are caring for their autistic children and they’re burdened with the cost of bringing, sometimes, their autistic children down south just to get that specialized care.
In the hospitals, too, we have a few patients who live there in the extended care unit. Sometimes, of course, there’s separation from family, and sometimes we have disabled persons who have to be removed from their family and communities.
Being disabled, there are challenges in terms of transportation. We just heard about it, accessibility, plus access in terms of big, large buildings such as this.
My question is to the Minister of Health and Social Services. Since 2008, what enhancements have been made to the department’s Action Plan for Persons with Disabilities? Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Nadli. Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The action plan that the Member is referring was put in place in 2007. It was done in partnership with a number of different organizations, including the NWT Disabilities Council.
We recently had some discussion with the NWT Disabilities Council about helping us to provide an update on that plan. I’m happy to provide the Member and committee with a written update of all the actions in the action plan to date and how we’re going to move forward with the council to do an update. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. The five key areas of the action plan include employment, education, income, disability supports and housing. One of the problems that government seems to have once in a while is working in silos. We have, perhaps, one division in a department working in isolation from another division. An example right now is Health and Social Services. The Minister is stating the responsibility for public transportation for disabled persons is a responsibility of communities, basically MACA.
In these key areas, what interdepartmental activities are being undertaken to advance the quality of life for disabled persons? Mahsi.
Mr. Speaker, within the action plan, a number of the activities actually require departments to work together: Health and Social Services; Education, Culture and Employment; but not just the government departments but organizations that are providing services to residents, like the NWT Council for Persons with Disabilities and organizations like the Yellowknife Association for Community Living. Within the action plan, it identifies clearly who’s working on what initiatives, and I’d be happy to provide Members an update of where we are on that action plan today, a status report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Right now there has been discussion in terms of the Stanton Hospital updates. Within the hospital, we have an extended care unit, and unfortunately, there are some persons who live there because there is no other facility to house them.
I believe it’s time for a designated territorial facility that provides professional, state-of-the-art rehabilitation services for disabled persons in a warm and homelike environment.
Will the Minister commit to examining the feasibility of such a facility? Mahsi.
Mr. Speaker, a number of times in the House I’ve made reference to the adults and youth living in southern facilities, and I’ve indicated that we’re going to be doing a review on a case-by-case basis to find out if there are any similar type conditions or individuals or groups of individuals that are out there in those facilities, to see if there’s an opportunity to repatriate them. That will go to what the Member is talking about to some degree.
But, also, we are moving forward with the renovations of the Stanton Territorial Hospital. As part of that plan, the extended care unit will not be located in that hospital. It doesn’t make sense to have an extended care unit in the hospital because it is a person’s home, for all intents and purposes. So as part of that plan, we are looking for an alternate site for extended care in the Yellowknife area, similar to services that are provided in other communities throughout the Northwest Territories, and that will have the programs and services for our residents within that extended care unit. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Nadli.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Minister for highlighting some of the possibilities. There’s hope.
The Minister has indicated the idea of repatriating some of our patients who live down south and possibly moving the extended care unit.
As the Minister leading the Department of Health and Social Services, what is his vision in terms of how it is that perhaps facilities designated for disabled persons could work, and how could industry and non-government organizations play a part in helping the government realize this dream of having a facility in the North for disabled persons? Mahsi.
Mr. Speaker, I was making reference to an extended care unit that currently exists within Stanton and that will have to be located outside of the building, but it does provide services to people living with disabilities who require extended levels of care.
As far as the funding model around the Stanton renovations, we’re looking at a P3 model and a request for qualifications has gone out to that effect.
If the Member is talking about a completely separate building designed for particular individuals to provide either short-term or long-term rehabilitation, that is a different building and we would have to talk about a building like that in the capital plan, which would have to go through the full capital process. Whether it’s built by the government or built by someone as part of a P3 or a lease to own, it would still affect the borrowing limit, so it would still have to go through the capital process as it would be a design purpose building.
But if that’s the wish of committee, we’re certainly willing to have that conversation, that discussion. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to use my questions to follow up on my statement today and it will be directed to the Minister of Human Resources and it’s about jobs.
In order to get, sort of, down to the nuts and bolts here, maybe we could ask the Minister of Human Resources to help explain the self-nomination process where we pay $795 to self-nominate in a program, and how is that making a dent into the fact that the last update from this government said we were pursing 571 jobs? I’m just trying to get a sense of what value we’re getting here when we self-nominate ourselves in a program that we don’t know who’s competing in and what value we’re getting. At the end of the day, are we getting people in jobs? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Canada’s top employer for youth is a process where there’s a selection committee. They look at about 800 applications, roughly 800 applications at one time and select what they consider to be the top 100. It’s not, I guess, solely related to whether or not we recruit, but it makes it more attractive if we can advertise that we are amongst Canada’s top youth and student employers, then we are more attractive in that sense. In that sense, I guess, we would be assisting in recruitment from that aspect of it. Thank you.
Well, I fail to fully understand why we go to a specialized marketing company and spend $795 to self-nominate, and when I actually called them they told me they couldn’t tell me who competes for these awards because that’s proprietary information. Ultimately, that’s what they said, and they can’t tell me about how it’s evaluated at the end of the day. It almost seems like it’s self-gratification designed.
By the way, let me be the first to announce, I’m creating a Yellowknife Centre MLA award. I won’t tell you who can apply, and it will be in 2014. It’s just as simple as that. Obviously, that was just being tongue-in-cheek.
The issue here is how are we getting these jobs filled when the government is busy nominating itself for awards that don’t really have any value?
Maybe I’ll try to provide some context to this. What the selection committee looks at is the physical workplace, working atmosphere, social, health, financial, family, benefits, vacation, time off, employee communications, performance management, training and skills development and community involvement. Some of the companies that are on this list that have been selected as top employers are companies such as CIBC, City of Edmonton, Coca-Cola Canada, Ikea, Ontario Public Service, Shell Canada, Telus, Xerox, KMG, LLP. There are a lot of companies there. I don’t think that it takes a whole lot of time. It’s not like the whole public service is busy trying to nominate themselves and we don’t have time to recruit. It’s a very simple thing. It’s an application. You put it in and it’s done. It doesn’t consume a whole lot of time. The people that do the selections, we’re not involved in selecting, so it’s not like we’re busy nominating ourselves for things, that we’re so busy doing that that we’re unable to recruit people to the public service.
I think the last sidebar provided the Minister is ultimately the crux of the issue. It’s not the fact that we have to self-nominate. Sometimes we have to draw attention to the great things we do. I understand that. But when we have to pay $795 to self-nominate, it does start to draw into question. This government has said, through its own little PeopleSoft software, that we have over 1,000 job vacancy positions. This government has said that they we are actively pursuing 571 jobs. I went to the job career website today and there were about 102 job postings. We all know there has got to be several hundred summer students that don’t have jobs, so how do we put all this together that we’re so busy nominating ourselves for a great job we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of job positions not filled, and we certainly have probably thousands of people from top to bottom of the Northwest Territories, whatever community you live in, that need jobs. How are we filling these jobs when we’re busy filling out applications to tell us how great we are?
Again, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we haven’t spent a whole lot of time nominating ourselves and maybe a very, very minor piece of work that was done in order to promote ourselves as a good employer. It’s a competition. It’s not like we nominated ourselves and we’re guaranteed to go on the list. Like I said, only a certain group of individual companies and governments and organizations are selected.
As far as summer students go, we’re on schedule to hire an equivalent amount of students that we’ve had every summer. As of May 2, we had hired 217 summer students, of which 70 of these summer students were in the regions, and of the 217 summer students, 48.5 percent were indigenous Aboriginal and 48.85 percent were indigenous non-Aboriginal, so we have hired our students to the tune of 97 percent, and we’re on pace to hire as many summer students as we did in previous years.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Population is in decline. The cost of living is up. The Minister says we’ve hired 217 summer students. I bet there are at least 800 in total that have been looking for work, so we’re lucky to even get 25 percent of the students hired. The bottom line is I want to know how many job positions are open and how we’re getting them filled. This government has repeatedly said they had 571 jobs they were actively looking for a few months ago. We’ve got, at best, in the range of 800 students, probably almost 600 looking for job. When you go to the website, there are only 102 job postings on our career website. It doesn’t seem like this government is interested in employing people and making sure that they can feed their families.
I’d like the Minister to tell me exactly how many of these jobs are open and what is he doing.
Like I said, we do get 700 to 800 applicants to our summer students. We hire around 300. We’re on target to do that again. We tried to do a fairly even split between Yellowknife, where the majority of the public service is, and out there in the regions and the communities. We do have 100 or so competitions at one time because we can’t run all the vacancies at one time. All the positions to recruit, we cannot run them all at one time. They’re at varying stages. Some of them may be at the offer stage, some are at the appeals stage, some are just becoming vacant and so on, so there is a constant flow. We have about 500, maybe 10 percent turnover, so on an annual basis we turn over about 10 percent of our public service. We do have a vacancy close to 20 percent and we hire casuals and so on throughout the years and we have the departments manage their human resources the best they can to get the job done.
I wish to table the following three documents, entitled “Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures), No. 1, 2014-2015,” “Government of the Northwest Territories Response to Committee Report 2-17(5): Report on the Review of the 2012-13 Public Accounts” and “Program Review Office Annual Report, 2013.”
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Lafferty.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document, entitled “Junior Kindergarten – Fact Package.”
Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following letter from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, dated May 16, 2014, regarding the extension of the term of the 17th Legislative Assembly.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.
Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents, entitled “Tundra Science and Culture Camp Annual Report” and “2012 Annual Report of Wildlife Research in the NWT.”
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to table a number of documents here from the Canadian Travellers Report Card and Evaluation of Government Policy and Practice for Canadians Who Travel, 4th Edition. This is by the Canadian Snowbird Association.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Thursday, June 5, 2014, I will move the following motion: now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, that the Legislative Assembly strongly recommends that the Department of Education, Culture and Employment identify and seek new funding to support the implementation of junior kindergarten instead of reducing funding to any other education districts; and further, that the department ensure that the Junior Kindergarten Program be professionally designed and delivered by properly trained staff; and further, that the Junior Kindergarten Program be oriented toward early childhood development and not a hybrid Junior Kindergarten Program; and further, the department’s rollout of junior kindergarten be focused on communities without an Aboriginal Head Start program; and furthermore, that the government provide a comprehensive response to this motion within 120 days. Thank you.
