Mr. Speaker, today I talked about the importance of hiring qualified, properly trained recreation staff in our communities and the struggles many of our communities are experiencing with this. My questions today are directed toward the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Geographically the North is unique in many factors, and these factors include the cost of living in each community. Taking this into account, can the Minister commit to taking the lead in developing standardized pay scales and job descriptions for recreation professionals?
Mr. Speaker, the Member’s statement regarding the challenges facing communities in hiring trained recreational workers and paying them a salary that is comparable across the board is something we’ve recognized for some time. The N.W.T. Sports and Recreation Council has recognized it. We’ve had some early discussions on it. They have been quite concerned about the level of investment that goes into the bigger events, such as our Winter Games, Canada Games, and want to have discussions about what the challenges are in the community and the possibility of redirecting finances. So my answer to the Member is: we will be entering those discussions, and I would be glad to share that information with the Member.
Mr. Speaker, if the community is able to hire qualified, properly trained recreation professionals, that usually means the individual will be hired from outside the community, in many cases from the south. Because of this, sometimes problems can arise because of cultural differences between the new employee and a community and its residents. It would be ideal to hire local individuals who work with recreation professionals and the community. Would the Minister commit to developing standardized job descriptions and pay scales for these local recreation positions?
Over the years we have really made the attempt to enhance our investments in our communities to deal with some of the real challenging areas. Recreation, of course, has been one area that we needed to see improvements in. We’ve increased the O&M funding to all our communities across the Territories, and in some cases that has been fairly significant. However, the investments are at the community council level — sometimes recreation doesn’t come out on the top, and other priorities overcome it in terms of investment.
We have certainly tried to expand our School of Community Government programs to be able to take in training for recreation workers and people at the community level. Nunavut Arctic College, of course, has a Recreation Leaders Program. We’re still in the position where we need investment from the community. We need to be able provide support. We need to be able to take a look at the whole issue of recreation leaders, recreation workers in the communities. As I indicated earlier, I’d be willing to look at that.
At one time the Department of Municipal Affairs provided a wage subsidy to these communities for recreation programmers and facilities maintainers. But with the new funding formula for financing communities, this was done away with. Mr. Speaker, attracting and retaining good, qualified recreation staff continues to be a constant challenge for our communities.
Would the Minister commit to once again providing a wage subsidy to allow communities to have competitive wage and benefit packages for recreation professionals in communities?
I guess I should first point out that recreation workers work for the community governments and not for our government directly. We, in turn, have, through the new deal program, really tried to enhance the government funding in the communities. We also have a community recreation contribution program which all communities can apply to. We, as a government, spend roughly $5 million in the area of sports and recreation. The N.W.T. Sport and Recreation Council spends close to the same, around $4.5 million. We have increased our money through the youth centres, the youth contribution. So there is quite a lot of support. We are moving forward to providing money for the Territorial sports organizations.
Mr. Speaker, it is difficult to make a commitment here in light of all of the reviews we are doing and be able to comfortably say that we will directly increase the support through recreation board programs.
