Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to use today’s Member’s statement to once again return to the issue of position vacancies within the Northwest Territories government. One day later, in my view and in certainly the view of many others, is one day no further ahead. If this problem was an onion, we keep peeling it back and the one thing that is certain is that it just keeps getting stinkier.
The reality here is the fact that we just don’t know where these 800 jobs are and how they’re being filled, or in this case how we know they’re not being filled. Questions still need to be answered. Even after our briefing this morning, we’re still just as much in awe as to how this could be happening without anyone fully knowing exactly where these are. Questions like the other day the Finance Minister said there was an actual 571 jobs out there that are being actively pursued, but we know that there are at least 800, maybe even more. So what happens to those jobs? Do we continue to fund those jobs?
If you go to the website on the GNWT jobs area, it says they’re looking for about 100 people. So what happened to the 471 people that they say they are looking for jobs, are they posted with invisible ink on this website? I don’t know. Nobody knows where these ghost jobs are. Are there 100? Are there 200? By the way, that would add up to 10 to 20 million dollars. We just don’t know. We need to know where these jobs are located and what they’re doing sitting empty.
The Minister of Human Resources may describe them as, well, geez, in some cases we have students and casuals in them. Well, let’s face it. How do you actively pursue a job posting when you have a casual sitting in there that constantly gets renewed? I guess the question is: Are you really actively looking to fill these jobs? They may also say, well, geez, we use that money to hire summer students, so you hold a job open for a year and only fill it for three months. What do you do with the nine months’ money that’s left over? By that theory, you should be hiring four summer students, not one. Where is the part that starts to make sense?
There are so many questions and we’ll continue to pursue them later today in question period, but we still need to know where are all these missing jobs, these ghost jobs. How many are there? How are we funding them, and by golly, why do we bother still keeping them on the books if no one is interested in filling them? Because, quite frankly, as I said yesterday, if we have jobs on the books that we’re funding, then nothing is more clear than it is simply a slush fund. We’ll be pursuing this later today in question period.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
