Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to follow up on what the Minister of Human Resources continues to keep talking about. He keeps talking about infrastructure.
I fail to understand why infrastructure is such an issue with Northerners being hired, but it’s okay to go to Ottawa to hire people even though we may not have infrastructure here. Maybe the Minister of Human Resources can explain what infrastructure means and, in that regard, why it matters when it comes to employing Northerners but infrastructure isn’t an issue when you go to Ottawa to hire those folks there. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The career fair in Ottawa was one method that we were using to try to attract individuals to the North. They come to the North; they would be subjected to the same type of infrastructure and housing deficiencies as anyone else here.
We are also trying to advertise in the North. We have open houses. We’ve had one in Simpson. We’re going to continue to have open houses the next couple of months in all of our centres where we have career centres. We are going to have these open houses to try to bring people from these communities to the open house and talk about their potential career with the public service.
We are not ignoring individuals in the Northwest Territories. We’re open for business and we do accept people’s applications. People who apply, we accept their applications. We had a lot of applications, and I indicated earlier that we had 1,704 staffing actions last year. Not all of them are hires, but many of those are part of our recruitment process. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, we still fail to seem to get the answer to why these 800 jobs are, what I would say, a relative secret. Why would we be hiding these employment opportunities to Northerners? When you go to the website and you don’t see them there but it is okay to take the show on the road to Ottawa, and maybe make one northern stop, what’s the government’s benefit of keeping them a secret? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, they are not a secret, so it would be difficult to answer a question that leads with why is it a secret. Thank you.
Can the Minister say for certain that every one of these, whether it is 500, 800 or 1,000 jobs that are open today, that we know they are actively campaigning, because I am sure they are not flying around the country wasting people’s time.
Can the Minister guarantee that every one of these jobs is posted on our careers website, encouraging people to apply far and wide? Thank you.
No, I cannot guarantee that all of those 571 jobs will be on the career website and advertised soon; however, I will guarantee that we will be doing a full presentation to committee on exactly what the issues are with the vacancy rates and our complications with filling all of these positions and why these positions are vacant, where they are vacant and where we are having difficulties recruiting. I will assure the Member that tomorrow morning we will be putting a full presentation together and talking about all of the vacancy rates. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Of course, the final question begs the question about, you know, where is the money. Some of these jobs were probably vacant a short period, some are probably vacant long periods, but when you add up to 571 jobs, as stated by the Finance Minister, that’s a lot of money sitting doing nothing.
So the question is: How much money are we talking about and where is it going if it’s not employing people? That answer certainly deserves a little light and the public deserves to know. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, even though the position is vacant, the job still has to be done. Often the positions are filled with a casual, and also when we have some vacancy rates, we create some money for summer students so we are able to hire summer students. It is very important to us as a government, when these kids are out at university or college, when they come back to the Northwest Territories that we try to employ them so they have a better chance of success when they go back to school. Last year we employed 308 summer students. If we had every position filled to the max all the time and there was absolutely no vacancy rate, that would be one program that we would have to cut, the Summer Student Employment Program. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What can the Minister do to show us where that money is going? This Legislature votes for that particular money to be allocated for a very specific purpose. I don’t know the FMB rules that tightly to be able to say if you take that money and spend it somewhere else, you’ve breached that. I can’t say that today, but I am certainly going to look into it. How do we account for that money? If it’s not going to these jobs, the public sees it, rightly, as a slush fund to do whatever they want. So how do we know the money is going exactly to what it was designed for and passed in this Legislature for? Will the Minister explain that and guarantee it and also demonstrate it in writing to this Legislature? Thank you.
The money to hire employees for the GNWT is there and we use that money for that purpose only. We don’t spend it on other things. Tomorrow morning we will be able to demonstrate in committee the full program of vacancies, hires, and we can do comparisons with the main estimates. We are prepared to do all that. We had promised committee we would do that work and we are doing that tomorrow morning. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
