Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What would this session be without a little bit of discussion on the topic of jobs? Jobs matter. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. If you live in Tulita, Aklavik, Ulukhaktok or even Yellowknife, jobs matter. Jobs are what help people get along. We need jobs to pay our rent, to take care of our kids, to put food on our table. Jobs matter to everyone. Recently something drew my attention to this problem and I’m trying to figure out what we are doing about this. Well, recently the government was touting, once again, that it has been nominated and found as one of Canada’s top employers. It was a top employer in 2013 and yet again now it claims another title of being a top employer for young people and a diverse employer. But we’ll get to the details of that challenge here in a minute.
The GNWT is a good employer and I think on many occasions it needs to be recognized for its hard work, but are we focusing our administration on the award and getting nominated or are we focusing on the true problems of unemployment rates that are the highest in the land? In small communities, when you have 70 percent unemployment, what are we doing about these things?
Look across the land and you hear nobody saying, “Oh boy, the cost of living, if it would only go up, we’re getting by so easy.” I haven’t heard that at all. Quite the contrary. I hear about the cost of living as a significant problem whether you live in Aklavik, Tulita, or you live anywhere. It is a problem.
I hear from my colleagues about job opportunities and how few they are, while we’re worried about nominating ourselves about what a great job we’re doing. Are we actually getting the job done? I’m constantly getting calls at my office from summer students still scrambling and looking for any opportunity of experience, let alone just paid.
So, back to the top employer issue. Does it seem realistic that the GNWT would pay $795 to self-nominate itself to a specialized marketing company in order to get an award that we don’t really know what it’s about? I called this company and they wouldn’t tell me anything. I asked them how do you apply and they said, well, you pay almost $800 to get on their list and they evaluate. I asked them, what do you evaluate it against? They said, well, go to our website and that will tell you who applies because they’re the winners.
It’s kind of a clandestine sort of approach on meeting the bottom line. We must focus our efforts on what’s important: getting jobs into small communities, getting jobs for Northerners. I think it’s now time to return to the discussion about those 1,050 unfilled jobs with that job snapshot. Let’s talk about those 571 jobs that this government is supposed to be pursuing and let’s see what else we can do for those summer students that so desperately need the money and the opportunity. Thank you.
