Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In keeping with my continuing evaluation of the current administration, today I wish to talk about our growth in the GNWT workforce.
It is a known fact that managing the size of government is an important component of fiscal performance. Compensation and benefits for government’s departments, boards and agencies account for approximately 40 percent of the GNWT’s spending on operations. With the 2015-2016 average costs of compensation and benefits for a government employee at more than $100,000 per year, we should give this some attention today.
The GNWT workforce, which includes boards and agencies, has grown 30.7 percent from 2000 to 2015 to a total of 5,438 employees projected for the 2015-16 year. But when you isolate just boards and agencies, they have grown somewhat more than GNWT departments at the 33.1 percent respectively, although this rate of growth is significantly lower than the growth of operation spending, as I said earlier, at 115 percent, and our revenue at 149 percent during that same period.
Mr. Speaker, looking at this all from another angle, we need only to review GNWT employees as a percentage of the NWT population as a whole. If you look back to the 16th Legislative Assembly, we witnessed a decrease in this relationship, and it’s not until the start of the 17th Legislative Assembly where we see a steady and modest trend upwards in our workforce growth.
We all know this administration was saddled with devolution responsibilities, so we need to evaluate how well all this managed in comparison to the trends in workforce growth. Understandably, we saw a substantial growth in the number of GNWT employees with devolution implementation. This is a given. But this contributed to the GNWT’s workforce to rise above 12 percent of the total NWT population for the first time in our post-divisional history.
However, as I indicated earlier, even before devolution this percentage of workforce growth was rising moderately and trending at a much higher percentage than the previous three Assemblies. It is therefore my conclusion that although we saw reasonable stewardship of the devolution responsibilities as a percentage of workforce growth management, it is with the overall trend and management that I have a concern with. It is under this evaluation framework that I recognize the management of growth of the GNWT workforce for this McLeod government to be at a B minus grade. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
