Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to direct my questions on this topic today to the Premier, the Minister responsible for the Executive and for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations. The Department of Executive and DAAIR hired two summer students last year. To date how many students have been hired for this year?
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Premier, Mr. Roland.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have one that is hired and two positions that are in the process of being filled within Executive. Within Aboriginal Affairs I have two working in the department and another P1 in the process, as well.
It will be good to see some summer students working especially in DAAIR that are P1 candidates, because I’ve often found it curious that when DAAIR comes before us as committee and so on, that amongst their management there has been on occasion no Aboriginal representation in a department that actually oversees Aboriginal affairs and relations.
I’d like to ask the Premier when the planning for hiring summer students started, what does the department do? Do they look around at jobs that have been set aside? How is the planning? Take us behind the scenes and how the planning is done for summer students. Because, I mean, we are looking for value for money and I’m sure there must be a backlog of things that build up that people don’t get to. Tell us, how do you begin to identify work that could be done by a summer student?
The process that we use, number one is if there...and through the Department of Human Resources working through a number of categories and programs we have in place. For example, as individuals go through to college or university and they have specific training that could then be used by the department in some of the work we have scheduled for the summer season.
I’ll use last year for an example. We knew we were going to be tasking our people within Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations on the Northern Leaders’ Forum work on vision exercise, so we hired a couple of individuals there to help us with that work. So it’s that kind of planning when we know we have additional work to be done that we would begin that planning process, align with the pool of students that have been registered with the work that would be required if it fits with their school and experience in that area and progressive training in a number of areas.
I must say as well, though, at times we are targeted in a sense, pointing out that at the senior management table we seem to have a lack of Aboriginal people there, I can go through a list of Aboriginal people who have come up through the system and that have been scooped, I might say, by other departments as they’ve moved on to permanent jobs within the government in other departments. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, it’s very reassuring to hear that it isn’t just looking for tasks that have languished on the back burner throughout the rest of the year and then looking at perhaps getting summer students to different jobs that perhaps are not departmental specific, but that we could take specific training that our post-secondary students are involved in and then apply that to initiatives being undertaken by that department to contribute to that. That’s very reassuring to hear.
Mr. Speaker, do you think it would be at all reasonably possible that we might get a total of five students between the Department of Executive and DAAIR for this coming summer? Would that be a goal that would be achievable? Thank you.
I believe we will be there this summer, with a total of five between the two departments.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
