Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s been raised many times in this House about vacancies and the percentage now. The percentage is a number that moves back and forth, but we’ve agreed that in some form or fashion the government usually has about a 15 percent vacancy. It’s gone down to 13 but it’s gone as high as 16. So if we even take 15 percent, that’s 735 people not staffed at any one particular time in the Government of the Northwest Territories. So as we hire one, we lose one. It’s rote rolling, and to give you an illustration of that figure so I can get to my question, that’s approximately $60 million of human resource money at any one time that isn’t being tapped into because it’s waiting for someone to be hired because someone has gone out.
So, speaking to that money and how it was important for me to illustrate that was, how does the government track that money that isn’t being attached to or following any particular human person being paid through the human resource process, because we should really drill down to this actual dollar amount that isn’t being used properly. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The responsibility of the budgets lies with the various deputy ministers for each of their own departments. The vacancy is across the government. It is a reality of the public service right across the country. We do have a bit of a higher vacancy rate, I would say, than some of the other jurisdictions, but it’s fairly even with the smaller jurisdictions across the country. So, we don’t consider it to be anything unusual, but we are working with the vacancy report to ensure that we are actively looking at the vacancy report as we’re trying to fill the positions in the various departments. Thank you.
So if we had almost $60 million floating around in the bureaucracy in some form or fashion that’s never being tapped into, does Human Resources not have a policy about how money should be spent? So in other words, if money is dedicated, passed through the budget process in this very Assembly for human resource dollars, do we not have a policy that ensures it is spent only on human resource dollars? Thank you.
Again, the responsibility lies with each department; however, there has been some progress. In the last vacancy report as of April, we had we had over 1,200 vacant positions in the various categories. Actually, there are 11 different categories that we look at for the vacancies, and the last report as of October was just over 1,000, 1,038.
Many of the functions where we have difficulty recruiting full-time, we do hire casuals. We have, as of the snapshot on October 31, 2014, we were carrying about 183 casuals across the government. As the Member indicated in the Member’s statement, we are trying to fill 466 positions and there are other inactive positions, as well, that have a fairly significant number.
I asked about a policy that redirected human resource money to other functions and I didn’t get an answer, so I will assume we don’t have one.
Wouldn’t it be in the interests of the Department of Human Resources to track this additional money because it would lend the argument to the government knowing what type of money it has and its availability to spend on human resources, and it could give the membership of this Assembly, the MLAs the opportunity to talk about redirecting it as training money to help build strengths and competencies for these types of vacancies. Would that not sound reasonable?
The government does try to fill all of the positions. Sometimes the money for positions – and it’s not a whole lot of positions – does get used for other O and M requirements. It’s not like it’s wide open that the Ministers or deputy ministers can move money around from out of the O and M fund for salaries back and forth. It’s targeted for that and we try our best to fill those particular positions. Like the Member indicated, there are about 500 positions coming and going out of the public service on an annual basis and the rest of the vacancies are in other categories that are being filled by casual or inactive positions, for the most part.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister had mentioned how some of the money migrates into O and M and, frankly, this is concerning because I’m trying to find ways that we can either turn these empty jobs into training opportunities where we find ways to find folks or even evaluate them through the decentralization policy to find out if that makes sense.
Would the Minister be willing to see if he can help calculate and capture an actual real dollar amount of the money that is not directly being spent on human resource money through the normal staffing of positions so we can get a grip on this dollar amount so we can find a better way to ensure that we’re hiring people not just in the capital here but throughout the Northwest Territories? It’s job money. That’s what it was intended for. Can he do that?
Human Resources does work with other departments. We have a program now where we were anticipating filling quite a few of the positions in the departments called the Regional Recruitment Program, which is essentially a training program where an individual doesn’t meet all of their tasks, a candidate doesn’t meet all the tasks or functions of the job that are necessary to complete the job can be put into a regional recruitment position and then within that position they would get the training necessary to get them to a fully functioning position.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
