Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to talk today about something announced recently by our Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Glen Abernethy. On October 23rd, in a press release, Mr. Abernethy laid out a new Regional Recruitment Program. If I could just briefly quote from the press release: “The GNWT actively recruits Northerners to fill vacant positions, especially in the regions. At any given time there are approximately 150 to 200 vacant regional positions available within all departments, boards and agencies in communities. The Regional Recruitment Program will assist to place Northerners into these vacancies. This program is a tool that will help with decentralization efforts.”
I would like to applaud the Minister for this announcement and for this program because, as you know, the MLAs for Hay River at least, are extremely interested in government positions in regional centres. It’s one of our favourite topics lately.
Later today I’m going to have some questions for the Minister of Human Resources about how that vacancy rate compares in the regions compared to in headquarters. I also have an idea that I would like to throw out there that has to do with regional positions.
Quite often, when we talk about decentralization, we hear about deputy ministers and senior departmental staff getting together and trying to imagine or think of activities, positions, secretariats, government activity that can be decentralized to the regions. I have an idea that might help in this effort. The conventional thinking is that nobody would want to leave Yellowknife to go to a regional centre. That’s the thinking that’s out there, and that’s, I think, the thinking of the bureaucracy. Like, oh, we could never force people to move to a community like Hay River. So here’s my idea: Why don’t we survey people who are working at headquarters, who might be interested, who might confidentially share, through a survey, that they might be interested in going to a regional centre?
When you look around the public service in Yellowknife, my gosh, it has to be a collection of people who originated from a lot of these regional centres and they may have family ties, connections, traditional activities that they used to be involved in, perhaps in the region that they came from. So I think we should ask them. Rather than trying to do everything from the top down, perhaps we should survey the employees themselves and find out people who might be interested in relocating, with the job that they have, to a regional centre. That’s just a suggestion. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
