Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I talked about this government’s opportunity to provide post-secondary students who come home to the Northwest Territories to work for the summer. I don’t know what the statistics are right now on whether that number has been growing. I’m not sure what the statistics are with respect to how many of those students are priority 1 hires and how many are priority 2s, and I’d like to know, also, how many of those positions that are made available are made available here in the capital and how many are in the regions, and I’d like to know if the Minister has any of that information at his fingertips as a starting point. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The departments try to hire as many students as their budgets would allow them to hire for the summer. But we do try to achieve a greater number than what we have been averaging, around 300. So, as of right now, we have hired 230 summer students and another 23 who are ready for signing. So, 253 summer students.
At this time last year, we had 217 summer students and we ended up hiring 312 last year. So, we’re expecting to beat that number this year. Thank you.
I’d like to ask the Minister, do you have any idea what the breakdown is? Obviously, they’re hired for our Affirmative Action Policy, which would then employ priority 1 and priority 2 hire candidates, and I’d like to ask the Minister if he has any kind of a breakdown on how many of each of that category are hired by these departments. Thank you.
Of the 230 who are signed on, 120 of those students are priority 1 candidates and 106 of those students are priority 2 candidates and four students hired to date have no priority status. Thank you.
That is very welcome news, because I tend to hear more from the priority 2 students who are out studying, and when they come home, for some reason, they get screened out. So, it’s very good for the public to be aware of that breakdown between P1 and P2 students. So, I’m glad we’ve got that out there and on the record.
However, we have more than this number who are out taking post-secondary education. We have a recruitment and retention issue in the public service in the Northwest Territories. I still think it would be better if there was an initiative to hire more summer students and try the best we can to match their area of learning and training to a position in the public service here in the Northwest Territories.
So, I’d like to ask the Minister, how would he see ensuring that departments have money to hire more students, and does he know how many post-secondary students there are in total, perhaps, who are outside of the Northwest Territories in school? Thank you.
The Department of Human Resources tracks some students by the amount of applications. So, we start in December by holding open houses. We contact students. We go through a process of inviting students. We have a website inviting students to apply.
Last year we had 598 students apply for summer employment, and of that we hired 312, like I indicated. To date, we’ve had 558 summer students apply.
My understanding is that at the end of this month, a lot of the technical students will be returning to the Northwest Territories, so we’re expecting a little bit of a jump there. So, the next point where we see increases is usually at the end of May. So, we’re anticipating that we could easily beat the number of last year, but I don’t know exactly how many students will actually be hired. Again, it would depend on department-by-department budget numbers. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps in the past, and I’m not too sure of the details of this, this government collaborated and cooperated with the private sector to expand the number of students employed back in their home Northwest Territories for the summer months who are involved in post-secondary education.
I’d like to ask the Minister if his department has recently contemplated the idea of doing a top-up to the private sector for hiring post-secondary school students in their workplaces and is that a way that we can expand the number of opportunities? We don’t want to lose our students to the South. We would like to get them back home and get them some experience in their field of training. Thank you.
Those are real good ideas that I’m going to have a discussion with the deputy minister of Human Resources on.
One thing that was contemplated this year, it was interesting, it was brought up by another Member last year, and that was hiring students on a 0.7, 0.8 basis so that they have an opportunity to also work outside of their field of studies and maybe go into the private sector a bit and then give the private sector an opportunity to also attract the students. That was something that we looked at so that we would broaden out. If we were to hire all the students at 0.75 as opposed to the full-time job during the summer months, then we’d be able to increase the amount of students by 100, for example, last year. So, that was something that we looked at closely.
There was a bit of an issue with doing that right then. Maybe we didn’t have the time in HR to be able to sort out all the numbers and so on, but certainly that’s the one idea that we would look at, subsidizing the private sector to be able to attract students and also doing some as part-time summer jobs for summer students so they could also venture into the private sector. Those are good ideas that the department will look at. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
