Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to throw a few single words out there that the government might want to consider when trying to recruit people for the 800 vacant positions and how we are going to get Northerners first and foremost into those positions and, secondly, how we could attract other people to come here. Let me throw a few of those out: mentoring, sponsorship, job shadowing, transfer assignment, succession planning, partnerships with the private sector, tracking our students when they’re out there, forecasting labour market trends in the Northwest Territories so we can tell students even when they’re in high school what kinds of positions we’re going to have a shortage of going forward, scholarship, loan forgiveness. If we lose $25,000 for every student that doesn’t come back to the Northwest Territories – at least $25,000 and probably more once they get established and start a family and so on – what are we doing with their loans, the debt? That’s what you hear down south all the time. The biggest burden for post-secondary, after people graduate from university with an education, is starting off life with these incredible education debts. We should get ahead of the ball here and try to think about doing something, knowing full well that if we don’t get our population up, that grant from Canada is just going to keep going down.
I’d like to ask the Minister of Finance, on the 800 vacant positions, how many of those are inactive and how many of them are we actively trying to recruit people into?
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Minister of Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At this particular moment, I understand we are recruiting actively for 571 positions.
I’d love to see where those advertisements are. You’re actively recruiting 571 positions in the Government of the Northwest Territories. Does the Minister have a breakdown of how many of those are in headquarters and how many of those are in the regions?
I don’t have that level of HR detail, and I don’t have the ability to ask my colleague from Human Resources to provide the statistics, but we have those numbers available, it’s just that I don’t have them before me here today.
Well, if the government is actively trying to recruit for 571 vacant positions in the public service at this time, you know, please include us in that challenge. We probably could have some ideas to help you out in filling some of those positions.
I would like to ask the Minister of Finance, on the 800 vacant positions, what kind of monetary dollar value does 800 vacant positions represent? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If you used the ballpark figure of, on average, $100,000 per position, the math would be $80 million. Thank you.
Is there a strategy or anything out of the ordinary in place right now to attract, recruit for those vacant positions at this time? I don’t know; if there are that many advertisements and that many posts out there on government websites, I haven’t seen them.
What is the effort that is being put forward at this time? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, we are doing things like regional recruitment. We are looking at the way we are structured as a college and supporting post-secondary students. We are now doing things, as indicated in this House, like job fairs. We have the initiative that’s going to put market housing in the small communities, which we hope will allow us to staff long needed positions in the smaller communities. There are a lot of things being done not only by us but by industry.
The issue is, are we doing it, as the Member herself said, well enough. Clearly, when we look at our territorial population statistics, there is work to do. The fly-in/fly-out, as well, is a challenge. We also believe there is significant opportunity in the immigrant Nominee Program. The one political case that comes to mind is Premier Wall from Saskatchewan went all the way over to Ireland as part of a recruiting career fair to sign up Irish folks to move to Saskatchewan to fill jobs that are going begging. We are in a very competitive market to do those types of things in addition to trying to employ every Northerner that we possibly can. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.
