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.
