Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to continue with the Minister of Human Resources on the Summer Student Employment Program. It’s funny; I got a tweet a minute ago saying: “Didn’t you hire somebody from down South”? I think it’s a good question and fair question to ask. I put three job offers out, but they were all waiting for GNWT jobs because they assume they pay much better, it would be more lucrative. That’s part of the issue here, is the fact that a lot of kids are waiting for jobs and they don’t want to take them. They’re hurting the public sector as well. They just want a shot at a job, a little experience and to put some money in their pocket.
I would ask the Minister of Human Resources what type of information they track on re-hires, early hires by the department. If they don’t do this, can they do this for me, and other Members obviously would find this interesting, and capture the last three years, as I said, on re-hires, early hires and by department? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Summer Student Program is one of the programs used to provide experience to students so often they are rehired, the same summer student will be rehired in the department. So if there was a biology student that was hired by Environment and Natural Resources, there’s a good possibility that that individual would be hired after the first year, second year, third year, and we do have those stats. All of the databases in the GNWT, we track all of the students that apply and enter that into a database and all the individuals that were hired by the GNWT are also in the database. So it would be very easy for us to track students that come back year after year. Thank you.
Thank you. I hope at the end of it he meant he was going to supply me that particular information, but I’ll let him make that decision. I thought that was an excellent example, if we hire a student we may consider rehiring them again and maybe they do, but of course if you’re the next bio student that means you need not apply, you have no shots and the fact is there’s no competitive process. So what he’s just done is reaffirmed that any bio student has no shot at any opportunity.
My next question, of course, for the Minister of Human Resources is what type of feedback is done through the Department of Human Resources to reach out to these students that weren’t hired? I think it would be good to get feedback from them and, at the same time, feedback to them. What I mean by that is there may be reasons their resumes didn’t make the top of the list and we could work with them to help them, they probably get no feedback, and at the same time, I’d like to know, and I think the Department of Human Resources would like to know, their feelings and experience of this whole process. If the Minister does this, can he enlighten us and if he doesn’t do this, would he tell us they would be able to do this? Thank you.
Thank you. I just used an example, that wasn’t exclusive to the fact that we would only have one such position that nobody else would be eligible. There could be more than one position of any type. The students, if the Member is asking about feedback from when the students were hired and then as they go back to school we provide them follow-up feedback, we don’t do that. But we do, like I said in December, start to get the word out that we are going to be hiring summer students like we do every year. There’s a Student Financial Assistance e-mail blast that goes out and it goes into the GNWT Bear Facts, on Facebook and so on. Thank you.
Thank you. Not every single year, but I’ve been an MLA close to 11 years now and I’ve tried to hire a summer student some summers, I’ve hired not only two but I’ve had three and let me tell you, it’s quite a treadmill, if I may say, trying to find work for three students, but I know they need the cash. So that now leads me into my next question, which is, is the Department of Human Resources willing to consider maybe a job sharing policy that splits some of the jobs? I mean, it’s not for me to say how we should split them, but by way of example, as the Minister just said earlier, they had 700 applications and they hired about 300-and-some students. My goodness, if we had job shared some of these we could have hired all the students, and at the same time, we would have given them enough money to be able to reach out in the private sector and sort of help them as well. In other words, we’d be helping the students get experience, we wouldn’t be stealing them all from the private sector and we’d be giving more students more opportunities. Would the Minister tell me about a policy or if he’d be interested in coming up with some type of policy like that?
Thank you. I think that this type of policy is something that could be looked at and discussed. We do hire the summer students that come back. Summer students that are looking for full-time employment during the short time that they are out, and need to make enough money to be able to get through the next year in many cases. So when we hire students, it’s often in an attempt to give them a full-time job or seven-and-a-half or eight-hour-a-day job for the full duration of the time that they’re out of school, so the idea of splitting jobs may be something that can be discussed with some of the students, and there may be some students that want to come out and only work half-time and other students that don’t have jobs may want to do a job sharing type of scenario. Maybe that is something that we can look at. We’re not adverse to try to do the best we can for the students. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At the end of the day, really I’m after just a couple of simple things: a bit of transparency, a bit of competitiveness and for us to spread every single opportunity out as reasonably as possible. As I said, I’ve hired two, sometimes three students. I try to hire a couple every summer. I try to pay them what I can and more sometimes knowing that they need the money, and the opportunities not only just in Yellowknife but in the small communities are very few and we’ve got to find a way.
So I’m looking, just as my last question, I hate to say I’ve given him a softball, but the fact is I really want to hear what this Minister can do to change our strategy so we can hire and maximize as many summer student opportunities as possible and I’d really like to hear how he’s going to change and do business differently, because it’s important. Thank you.
Thank you. The Department of HR can start to communicate with the departments and discuss that with the departments, if we’re attempting to try to hire as many students as possible within the money that we have in our vacancies, so we can do that. HR, through the deputies, can contact all of the deputies to see if they’re able to maximize the amount of students that are coming in, not only in Yellowknife but in the small communities and the regional centres, because I recognize that that’s been an issue in the small communities as well. So, yes, I’d be more than willing to talk to the deputy and have her work with other deputies to make this a possibility. Thank you.
