Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of MACA. Given the community of youth and the nature of the department, it might be good to see what the Minister is willing to hire students in the communities. The department, going back through the Summer Student Employment Program from last year to this year, there’s only six students being hired. Is there any increase to the number of students being hired in the communities in the Territories?
Thank you, Mr. Jacobson. The honourable Minister responsible for Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. Robert McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We currently have six summer students within the department. In some of the smaller communities, the recreation department in the community would use some of the money from MACA to bring on one or two summer students. If we were to take into consideration all the different agencies and delivering agents for some of the departments -- MACA or housing -- then we’d find that our summer student numbers would go up. The communities themselves would be able to try and access monies to bring on a summer student.
When the departments start planning on hiring summer students for the summer work season, how much money is the department giving to each community?
We make a contribution to each community. I think last year we made the contribution of $825,000 to the recreation in each community. We have it broken down by the communities. If they’re wanting to they’re able to use that money to… I mean, again, it would be the decision of the community. We can’t tell them how specifically to spend it. Through the committee of Rural and Remote Communities I believe we had identified some money that we wanted to funnel into the communities to help the communities with creating some employment that would obviously include summer students.
Although we’d obviously like to see increases in hires, would the Minister commit to hiring at least six summer students and try to double it to 12 this summer at Municipal and Community Affairs?
The departments within MACA have come back and said, well, they’ve funded for six students and this is what we’ve identified now. I think there’s an opportunity here for maybe all of us as MLAs to bring on a summer student. That would be an additional 19 summer students that we could potentially hire for two or three months. That’s something that we should consider.
In this day and age we have a lot of students that are out there looking for summer employment. I think it’s incumbent on us as Members, as departments, as all the delivering agents in the communities, the communities themselves, to see how many of these summer students we can put to work so as to be able to gather up some money for going back to school next year.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
