Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to follow up with questions to the Minister of Human Resources here. It’s been brought up many times with the vacancies that we have within our government system. I talked to people back home and some of the concerns they bring up is they constantly see a job posting but it never gets a hiring.
I’d like to ask the Minister, for all the GNWT jobs that we have in the Northwest Territories, who writes the job descriptions? Because we’ve also heard with the college students that a lot of these job descriptions ask for two, three, four, five years’ experience. That already takes them out of the equation and doesn’t help them out when we’re trying to get our own northern workforce in.
I’d like to ask the Minister, who writes these job descriptions that go out into the public?
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The job descriptions are written by the department that will be employing that specific person once the person is hired.
Going off some of my colleagues’ questions here, because we have all these job descriptions out there and we also have job postings that aren’t being met. You look on the website and there’s, I don’t know how many there are, but I know they’re not all being filled. We talk about the main estimates and the budget process where we approve these funded jobs for the government and the departments but they’re not being filled.
I’d like to ask the Minister, and he already alluded to this earlier, but what happens to these dollars that we approve for these job positions? What happens to the dollars within the departments that we go to the positions and they’re not being filled?
As I indicated earlier, there are various uses for the money that goes in with the positions. The departments still have the mandate to perform the tasks that are assigned to them as a department, so sometimes when they’re unable to fill a job and after a job description is completed, and the job is advertised over the period and they are, for some reason or another, unable to fill a job, then some of that money would go to a term position perhaps. It could be going to a casual and also has been used for relief workers. Sometimes when you don’t have all of the positions filled then there’s a requirement to pay overtime, so sometimes there is overtime paid, and sometimes the departments also go through a process, I guess, well, all departments go through a process or passive restraint and sometimes the management of the human resources is part of the passive restraint.
The Minister mentioned that for different reasons jobs are vacant and the money is used for other areas.
With some of the challenges that we have within our departments possibly filling the position, would the Minister agree or would the Minister allude to our positions within some of our departments deliberately left vacant so dollars could be used for other areas. Can the Minister please confirm or allude to that question?
Yes, I can confirm that that does occur to meet other priorities, to support other positions that are required and also to take pressure off budget to avoid over-expenditures.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. He did confirm that some positions are deliberately left vacant to offset some of the O and M operations stuff, so why don’t we see those operations in the budget process right from the start and not put these positions out that we agree to? It’s ridiculous how we approve this budget here.
My last question is: Based on the job descriptions that departments write, how does the Minister or what is his goal or his strategy to get our educated students that have no job experience into the job system and into public service knowing that the job descriptions ask for two years’ experience plus?
With the students that are trying to gain experience, the Government of the Northwest Territories uses a couple of methods to give the students experience. One is the Summer Student Program. We try to track some of the students that are going to school down south and we try to employ them during the summer giving them some experience each year. Also, at the end of that, when some of the students are finished school and want to get into a job to gain some experience, we use the Internship Program to bring students into the GNWT.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
