Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m really looking forward to seeing the breakdown of those 571 vacant positions, where they are located, whether that would be in the regions or in the headquarters.
The Minister of Finance indicates that they are actively seeking to recruit candidates for those 571 positions; however, on the GNWT website right now there are 126 jobs advertised. Of these, five are short-term, 10 are terms, and so that amounts to 126 versus 570-something.
I’d like to ask, where are the other 400 jobs being advertised? Are they on some other website? Are they being recruited by boards and agencies? How would a person know?
The government says that they have these vacant positions. It leads one to wonder what happens to all the money that we vote to those departments for those positions if there’s nobody in them. It rather begs the questions, and now we see evidence that the government is not even trying to recruit for them, unless it’s somewhere else that we just can’t find. Hey, we’re MLAs. If we can’t find them how can the public find them?
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If the Member wants a response to her question, I will direct it to the correct Minister to answer the question.
The easy way to reduce the 800 positions is to delete the positions that are no longer required, so that’s one way to delete them, but in order to get accurate information, I will direct the question to the Minister responsible for Human Resources.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The department has developed a Workforce Planning Strategy across the territory that is designed to fill the positions. Currently, we are looking at each of the vacant positions and why the positions are vacant. Many of them are at the community level, and many times we don’t have the infrastructure to fill those positions, so we are examining an example that I brought forward earlier with the regional recruitment where we might be able to fill the position with an individual that would need approximately one year’s worth of trainings using 20 percent of that individual’s salary to train that individual up to meet the requirements of the position.
Right now, of the 571 positions, 328 of those positions require a university degree, so just that alone can be an issue because most of the people that live in the Northwest Territories that have university degrees, in fact 97 percent of the people in the Northwest Territories that have university degrees already have jobs, so when you’re trying to fill positions that need university degrees then you have a very small pool to work with that creates one issue. In addition to that, 270 of those positions are located in the regions and the communities and not having the proper infrastructure to attract individuals, such as housing and office space is also an issue.
I find the Premier’s comment extremely unusual. I was asking about how we can fill the positions. I wasn’t suggesting we should delete the positions, and I don’t know where that came from. If we can’t fill them, well, we’ll just delete them. I mean, I didn’t ask anybody to delete positions, especially not since so many of them are actually located in our regions.
We’re all about decentralization on this side of the House, and we think you are over there, too, so I don’t know what deleting positions has to do with anything. However, if we are actively seeking to fill 571 positions in the Government of the Northwest Territories, I’d like to ask the Minister of Human Resources, as the appropriate Minister, where are we putting that information out? Are we just letting them sit there and we’re not recruiting because we don’t have jobs or we think there are no people out there with university educations? I’d like to know, where are we putting this information for the public?
Recently, the department has done surveys to determine what the best method was to attract people to the public service, by asking individuals that have come to work for the government how they got their information to come to the government. Only 2 percent of the individuals that came to work for the government had indicated that they had found their position advertised in the paper, so we are doing e-recruit.
A lot of our strategies now have been to do e-recruitment right across the Territories and in the communities. These positions will appear on the website and what we are doing is asking individuals to submit their resumes to the government electronically and we’re putting them into the system and we’re trying to match the positions, the individuals with their skills with the positions that are available.
We recognize that there is certainly a difference there. As I indicated earlier, many require a university degree. Many of the people that are looking for positions that aren’t employed don’t have the necessary skills, so now we’re trying to indicate individuals that are close enough to be able to meet the requirements and try to give them those requirements by training them for a year, using their own salary as training money. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the Minister of Human Resources, this shortfall of 500 and, well, actually 800 positions, but 571 that we are actively trying to recruit, how long has that situation existed? Is this a new trend? Is this something new or is this something that has been on the books and unfilled positions for quite some time now? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, at any one given time the Government of the Northwest Territories carries a vacancy of around 10 percent and this is fairly standard, 10 percent of the entire public service. The positions do fluctuate. The various departments have about 1,500 staffing actions per year. So between all of the departments, there is always various staffing actions, so this is a shot that has been fairly consistent throughout the government but it’s like one shot. Almost immediately as this information comes forward it is out of date, but we have to at some point take a spot and say this has been relatively average, so this is the number we’re using. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I well understand the concept of people coming and going, there being job actions and positions being filled and positions being vacated. I understand that. Ten percent of the public service at any given time, the Minister used an interesting word when he said we “carry” about 10 percent vacancy in the public service. That makes it sound like that is kind of an acceptable thing to carry from one year to another, from one budget to another.
I would like to ask the Minister, is there an attempt, a serious attempt to fill this 10 percent, or is that carrying of those… Does that grant some serious financial leeway in these departments if those positions are not filled? Thank you.
As the Member can appreciate, this is a very complex issue. She indicated that earlier on. As Minister of Human Resources, I am prepared to give a detailed briefing on the positions, why some of the positions are vacant, why we’re carrying vacant positions while those jobs are actually being done, but could be done in casual positions.
Some of these positions are vacant because individuals are assigned to other jobs, and some of these positions are vacant because individuals are on leave and so on, so there are various reasons why there is always a 10 percent vacancy, roughly a 10 percent vacancy. The best I can offer would be that I can bring the department to give a detailed briefing to committee, if that’s the wish of the House. Thank you.
