Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to point out an irony, as I see it, with respect to hiring summer students to come and work in the Northwest Territories. Post-secondary students at southern institutions, we are supporting them, we are paying for them, and many of them who want to come back to the Northwest Territories for the summer cannot get a job with the public service.
The irony I speak about is that this government, on the other hand in another department, spends I want to say millions. I don’t know the exact number, but millions of dollars to go out and promote a program called Make Your Mark. They are going out across Canada, trying to assess people who have never been to the North, don’t know anything about it, don’t have any connections, and they are trying to attract them to the public service.
Meanwhile, we have students in post-secondary education who are priority 1, priority 2 students who are down south working for their education. We are paying for their education; we are investing in them; but when they try to get a job in the public service, we don’t have enough money to go around. We can’t hire them all. So, they are down there perhaps taking a specialized field like an engineer or something in the nursing field, some experience where we could bring them home to work for the summer. You know what? They might come back and work for the Government of the Northwest Territories at some point in the future.
I think it’s ironic that we would spend millions of dollars to attract strangers to come and work in the Northwest Territories in our public service, yet we can’t seem to find enough money to employ our students who are coming home.
Just in case anybody out there listening doesn’t know, priority 1 is an indigenous Aboriginal person under our Affirmative Action Policy. A P2, or priority 2, is an indigenous non-Aboriginal person.
I think we need to up the numbers in both of these categories. It’s understood that P1 is probably for the most part in our public service disproportionately under-represented. I understand that.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s a sad thing when we only have enough summer jobs in the public service to offer those jobs to priority 1 students. We need more to offer also to priority 2. After all, when we go across the country to try to attract people, those people have no priority hiring status in our government. We don’t even know them. The fact that a priority 2 student is indigenous non-Aboriginal means they are from here. Their family is here, but we are letting them slip away from us.
Later today I will have questions for the Minister of Human Resources on how we can better direct our resources to have more public service employment opportunities for our post-secondary kids. Thanks.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
