Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is to the Minister of Human Resources. I want to ask about the hiring of summer students this year. In the Sahtu the last three years we have graduated 50 high school students, not counting the Aurora College students. I want to ask the Minister if the government is on track for hiring summer students this year compared to previous years.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister responsible for Human Resources, Mr. Bob McLeod.
Our government continues to hire summer students. In comparison to previous years we are down approximately 25 percent in the numbers of summer students that we’ve been hiring to date.
If there aren’t enough positions in the Government of the Northwest Territories for our own students, is the government looking at subsidizing local Aboriginal governments, NGOs, and the private sector, to hire students?
The Department of Human Resources is not providing such a program. At the advice of the Small and Rural committee, they recommended to the Department of Education to make such a fund available. I understand the Department of Education is making about $400,000 a year available to the private sector to hire summer students.
The Government of the Northwest Territories has the campaign Make Your Mark Campaign to attract southern workers to the Northwest Territories. This program was designed to bring people up north to live here and make their investment here. I want to ask the Minister if we could look at some of that work and look at some of the money that could maybe be re-profiled to ensure that our own local talents also have job opportunities here in the Northwest Territories.
The Come Make Your Mark program is a coalition of about 95 private businesses working with the government to promote the Northwest Territories. If the Assembly wants the government to hire more summer students, they just have to, when we go through the business planning process, support that and make recommendations to increase all of the departments’ budgets to hire summer students. The departments are the ones that do the actual hiring of summer students.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
I guess we could also carve off some of the slack that’s in government so we can hire some of these summer students to work for us. Will this government support the Aurora College students who are graduating with a career profession, such as education, teachers and such? I say this because we have an Aboriginal nurse graduating from the Nursing Program who couldn’t even find a job in this government. This student here had to work at a gift shop. There are students out there that cannot find work within our own force who are graduating from our institutions. I’m asking if this government can make a commitment to hire our own students who finish in our own schools in the Northwest Territories.
Our government already has a commitment to hire all of the graduates from the teachers program, the nurses program, and the Social Work Program. The caveat is that not everybody is going to get a job in Yellowknife or the larger centres. Some of these jobs are offered throughout the Northwest Territories. If you’re not prepared to be mobile, then it’s considered that once you’re made a job offer and you turn it down, then that’s considered as the government meeting its commitment.
