Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to return to the theme of jobs and, certainly, access to opportunities. We heard rightly from my colleagues, like Member Yakeleya, that, quite frankly, the average person wants to know why isn’t there a nurse in Colville or why isn’t there a community maintainer in Paulatuk or why isn’t there these plumbers in Fort Simpson. Like, why? When they hear of 1,150 job vacancies on that last snapshot, it causes great concern.
My questions, obviously, are for the Minister of Human Resources, and I’m going to say this: We passed the budget and we know that many of the positions are funded and those position dollars are moved to other positions. We also know for a fact that some of this job funding that we pass in this House is used for O and M, so the question really lies down to simply this: How many of these positions are we talking about that are specifically targeted at moving their job dollars to O and M funding and how much is that in dollars so the public knows what’s happening?
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That number is a fluid number. As of October 31, 2013, 35 positions were used between the departments and the agencies to cover other O and M requirements.
I want to ask the Minister for, quite simply, a clear and simple answer. We have 35 positions, which probably roughly works out to about $3.5 million, which were originally intended for human resource money that could actually put that nurse in Colville Lake, whether it can put that maintainer back in Paulatuk or other types of plumbers or those types of critical jobs that we always talk about.
My next question for the Minister of Human Resources is: We often hear about the fact that, for example, Stanton runs a deficit, the Beau-Del runs a deficit, all of these organizations run deficits because of unfunded positions. For the record, how many unfunded positions does the government run in the Northwest Territories and how do we come up with the funding of those types of positions, because I’m trying to grapple with how much money are we talking about?
We looked at the dormant positions with most of these positions. As an example, when the position is covered off by a casual, it’s funded. When a position is covered off by a contractor, it’s funded. If there’s money to be moved from a position to O and M, it’s funded. We looked at the other category where we’re trying to staff. Those are funded positions, so we looked at the categories that were inactive, and we looked at the 161 inactive positions to see which one of those were not funded, and we’ve come up with the fact that 125 of those positions are not funded.
I’m not going to take the compliment back from the first one, but I can tell you the answer from the second question was not that clear. The simple question is we run a lot of unfunded positions in the government and often we hear about these could add up to several hundred positions in the government that are not specifically funded. I want to know how many positions are unfunded but operational, whereas we have a body in them doing something that’s meeting the goals and objectives of the government.
How many positions are we talking about and how do we pay for those? I want to know how much money is being diverted from other things to fund these positions this Legislature hasn’t approved.
On unfunded positions across the GNWT, there would be some positions that are unfunded and there are also vacant positions that are unfunded. We have been working with the departments, as the Department of Human Resources, to determine which positions in our system, whether they are filled by casual, contractor or indeterminate positions, which ones are funded and which ones are being carried by the department as an unfunded position. I don’t have that information here with me, but we are very close to gathering all that information now from all departments. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister should resign himself to the fact that he should know this.
Next question. We know many times with historical values of vacant positions, which is approximately 14, 15, 16 percent, but if we use it as a rolling number, to be fair, that’s approximately $15 million passed in this House that are human resources compensation and benefits dollars each and every year.
So, what does the Department of Human Resources do to track that money, the $15 million that nobody knows where it’s going? How do we follow the money? The department may say that this is micro-management. I say it’s public accountability.
The department follows the positions. It’s a service department that provides a service to the departments in hiring, recruiting and retaining positions for the government. The departments make decisions on which ones to move forward with.
I’d like to give an example of positions. We have quite a few casuals for a variety of reasons. We have 208 casuals working as of October 31, 2013. For various reasons when we can’t sometimes fill the position because of the requirements, we aren’t able to find an individual that fits the requirements of that specific job title, but the job still has to be met. So we find a casual that can do the job with support from other staff because the job has to be done. That would be one of the examples in small communities where there are positions where the requirement could be of a university degree and we don’t have the housing in the community to bring someone else with a university degree in from another area to live there, so we take a local person, put them in a casual position and continue to try to do the job. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
