Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the spring this year the Minister of Human Resources had conveyed to Members that there were just over 1,200 vacancies on the books. The Finance Minister had said on the record that they were actively pursuing half of those, and that was 571 jobs. On further drilling down on those books there were 800 vacancies, and may I remind this government we have a 3.4 percent unemployment rate in Yellowknife, but we also have more than 30 percent unemployment rate in the communities. We need these jobs, they’re critical.
So let’s first start off from the Minister of Human Resources to find out what the state of affairs are for job opportunities available to Northerners. How many jobs, if I went to look today, will I find being posted in one form or another that Northerners can apply for? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Our PeopleSoft is essentially a snapshot, but the numbers are fairly static throughout the year. So at the point when we did the last print off on PeopleSoft, the last time it was able to give us our semi-annual information, we had 244 jobs that the government was pursuing to fill and 281 jobs that were scheduled to be filled within a short time after that. Thank you.
I didn’t have a chance to write those numbers down, but if we put them together they sound like about 500 jobs.
Why are there only 70 jobs being advertised on our public website? Is this government not interested in hiring people to ensure that they can feed and take care of their families?
Thank you. Not all of those jobs are advertised at the same time, but they are in the process at some stage. Some of them could be at the point when the departments are putting together the information needed to go to advertisement. Some will be in advertisement. Some will be in the interview process and some will be at the offer stage and some could be at the appeal stage. So, this is a flow through. So, if 70 jobs are advertised at one point, I would say that’s a sufficient number to correlate with the numbers I’d given the Member earlier. Thank you.
We have just under 5,000 people employed in the Northwest Territories with the GNWT. We know that it’s a typical figure, 15 percent vacancy at any one time. The Minister only talks about the back end of the employment process. At the front end of the employment process is the same amount of people coming in as going out. So we have a constant number of about 700 or more vacancies in the Government of the Northwest Territories at any one time, but yet we only have 10 percent on the webpage being advertised.
Let’s get to new results and find out where we’re going with this problem. What did the Minister learn and how many new Northerners did we hire at these expensive job fairs when we’re not even advertising them here? He says we don’t advertise them all. Well, who are they for? Who? You know?
Let’s find out how useful these job fairs have been hiring people to bring them north, because I can tell you the stats say we’re losing people, not gaining them.
Thank you. I didn’t indicate that we weren’t advertising the majority of them. We are advertising the majority of the jobs. There are some jobs that do go through other methods. That’s true that people are able to secure positions that are not necessarily at the advertisement stage. Sometimes an individual could be getting a position through transfer assignment. Sometimes the department, after a couple of attempts and failure to fill the position do go to a casual position and fill with a casual position. Sometimes there is a contractor filling the position. So they are at various stages, but essentially I guess a good number to look at is anywhere in the 500s that are turning over each time. Of that, about just 300-plus or so require university degrees.
What we do know is that the majority of individuals in the Northwest Territories that are available in the workforce, people with university degrees, 98 percent of people with university degrees in the Northwest Territories have jobs. So when we’re looking to fill 300-some-odd positions, university degrees are very difficult to get that type of workforce out of the Northwest Territories. So what we’re trying to do is develop strategies that’ll allow us to hire people into what we consider hard-to-fill positions, university degrees, in the South to also help with bringing people north and then trying to do a campaign with the positions where required college, trades, high school or less in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I said, we know in the books we’ve had at least 1,100 or more vacancies because of PeopleSoft. The Human Resources Minister has just mentioned, you know, well now we’re maybe talking about 500 or more. Fifteen percent, as I said, is close to 800 job vacancies here in the Northwest Territories.
The fact is, unemployment rates continue to rise and the only thing that brings unemployment rates down is people give up looking for work. Not employment rates have risen; unemployment rates have dropped strictly because they have just given up.
So how do we fix the population decrease? I need to hear an answer from this Minister, and I’ll ask again, how have the results been and what have they delivered on these southern job fairs, because if they were a great source of hiring new people, our population numbers wouldn’t be dropping.
We recognize that the population in the Northwest Territories has dropped, but in the GNWT, from the last time we were able to print the PeopleSoft report, which was October 2013, and the next time we were able to print the PeopleSoft report, April 2014, we had a decrease in the overall vacancy rate.
The Member is right; the overall vacancy rate back then was 1,150. I gave various reasons as to where those positions lagged, but that number has gone down to 1,031 at this point. So we have decreased that number by approximately 120 persons and that vacancy rate number. Now, that 1,030 are spread out through the various categories of recruitment, like I indicated, positions being filled by contractors, casuals, in-active positions and so on. So there’s a spectrum of positions in the GNWT that would be considered vacant. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
