Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions are for the Minister responsible for HR. How can the Minister reassure staff at Stanton that it is worthwhile to participate in the current workplace survey being undertaken given the inaction of the government to act on them in the past. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you Member for Great Slave. Minister responsible for Finance.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Employee Engagement Satisfaction Survey is actually done roughly every two years, and it was postponed when there was collective bargaining back in 2018 and then postponed with COVID19 so it is actually a regularly done survey.
As for what has been done with it in the past, this is the first one that's coming to me so I can't speak to what may or may not have happened to it in the past, but it's the first one that I'm going to see. And Mr. Speaker, Minister Green and myself have met already before the current crisis facing the obstetrics unit. We have met about what to do to support better support the morale of the healthcare profession in the Northwest Territories. This survey was raised to me as one of the tools that we're going to have so am I very keen to see what's in it. I do encourage the staff to fill it out. And I do really want to promise that we're going to do best to act on it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the Minister's commitment to look at that and she knows I'll be holding her accountable if nothing comes of it, so.
My next question is what action is the Minister and her staff going to take to ensure that there is enough staffing at the hospital such that workers are free to take their earned leave without guilt, keeping in mind that payouts are not the solution as the nature of the work requires adequate time to recuperate given the trauma that is involved with the work. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I sincerely hope that any public servant right now who is tired and exhausted and stressed is not going to stop taking the leave that they need to take. The fact that we're in a crisis right now in terms of the numbers of staffing at Stanton Hospital is not the fault of the staff and I do want them to continue to take their leave. They need to take their leave. The crisis we're in started long before this month and long before last month and, frankly, probably as a result of the fact that people are burnt out and they do need their time. So this is not the fault of staff.
We do want to take responsibility here as the government for it, both myself and Minister Green are looking at this. Again, the Department of Finance is responsible for recruitment. We've seen good success on recruitment in this fall. We've had a number of hires. They just haven't been hired, just some of the critical spots that we needed to prevent what's going on in the obstetrics unit. But there is good results coming of those hires right now. So we're going to continue doing that work continue getting ourselves out there, continue promoting the Northwest Territories as a place to come and start your career and continuing with the graduates out of Aurora College where, again, tremendous results in terms of hiring there.
But, you know, beyond that, Mr. Speaker, there is always more to do. And I have actually been asking in the last few days what other steps we could take with staffing on the human resources side to make sure we're providing the supports to the authority on looking at, you know, who's doing what roles, who's doing what positions, are there maybe other options that can be used to support the folks that are doing the frontline health work. So again, those are things being looked at actively in the moment. We're going to keep working on it until we find a solution. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the Minister for her thoughtful answer. It's very important for the staff to be hearing from Cabinet that they take responsibility for what's going to on and that there's action that's going to happen.
My next question is what is the department going to do to compensate workers financially for the increased hazard of their work due to COVID as other jurisdictions have? Will this financial compensation be retroactive? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, I have enough responsibility but. But, Mr. Speaker, so various forms of this question have been asked I think through the week and, again, I want to ensure colleagues in the room, but particularly the public service, that we do take it very seriously well, two things we take very seriously is first of all the collective agreement and our relationship with the union, which means whatever we're doing in this front certainly needs to involve engagement with the union before we make any policy changes or any proposed changes that would impact on those processes which are so important to us.
We've also been doing jurisdictional scans so we are looking at what's happening in other jurisdictions. We do continue to be the second highest paid jurisdiction for a lot of our healthcare staff. Money isn't necessarily everything and sometimes the situation that we're in can certainly change what's going on in terms of the kind of financing or financial supports people will need.
So we're doing those scans, we're looking at what where we're at, we want to be competitive, and we also want to send some positive messages to our staff. So we are, right now, in real time, looking at whether there's some alternatives but as I have said, there are few things that we need to consider Mr. Speaker, and so that's part of the process we're going through now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Final supplementary. Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have a little tip for Cabinet stop saying that the highest wages are being paid in Canada when we have the highest cost of living. Thank you.
Number 4, will the Minister provide details about where the federal money was spent that was intended for frontline workers during COVID. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the COVID money that was received from the federal government wasn't necessarily allocated for employees or staffing or specific to, you know, hazard pay or anything of the sort. There was a number of different very specific pots that we received funding under. I mean, this is what helped pay for our waste water sampling program. This is what helped pay for isolation centre costs. And we've certainly reported on those costs throughout the course of the pandemic. I will commit to getting another update to the House on where the costs have been incurred and on the different funding pools that we have been able to draw from. And so we'll make sure to put that before the House. I would expect we could probably get that before this session's over or soon thereafter. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, minister. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
