Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are addressed to the Premier today. At the outset I would like to clarify, I never in my statement indicated that I was against decentralization. I am against how we are implementing the policy, and I challenge Members to read Hansard tomorrow and tell me where I said that I am against the Decentralization Policy.
My first question to the Premier is to ask the Premier what criteria are used to determine a position to be decentralized.
The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The criteria that we use are to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of programs and services that are delivered by this government.
I challenge the Premier to prove to me that we are improving the efficiency of programs and services when we remove long-standing employees from the position where they have become quite proficient.
To the Premier, I’d like to know what analysis has been done of the actions taken with regard to decentralization to date. What are the results from, I think it’s phase one and phase two that we’ve completed at this point of the decentralization plan? How many positions were vacant? How many were vacant or new positions? How many employees did we lose? How many employees left the NWT taking our $25,000 per person federal grant with them?
I’m pleased to say that we have decentralized 150 jobs to the regions and to the communities. We have a retention policy so that any employees that are affected were incumbents of decentralized positions that would prefer to remain in their existing position are given priority hire so that they can stay in their community of choice. They have the benefit of getting priority hire, so I don’t believe we’ve lost any employees that have moved to the South because of decentralization.
I would presume we haven’t done any analysis since there was no reference to that, and I would encourage the Premier to do that.
It’s one thing to ask somebody to take another job, but when they are happy in their job and they’re good in their job, why are we forcing them to move into a job that they maybe don’t enjoy?
I’d like to ask the Premier, considering our current fiscal situation and the need to reconcile our expenses and our revenues, how can the Premier and Cabinet justify increasing the cost of some person years just to decentralize?
When we look at the benefits from decentralization, we have to take other elements into consideration such as diversifying the economy, sharing the wealth and also the fact that we are investing in the Northwest Territories. We have committed to spending $21 million over three years to build additional housing in remote communities so that we can have houses and office space for positions in the smaller communities.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thanks to the Premier for that, and I think those are all good things. Providing housing and providing office space is definitely a good thing.
I’d like to ask the Premier if he has considered the recent actions of Nunavut, that they are reverting from decentralization back to centralizing some of their programs and services and people in Iqaluit. Have we as a government taken a look at why their decentralization did not work or are we blindly going down the same path?
As a government, we have taken a very strategic approach to decentralization. We have taken a very measured and conservative approach as opposed to we’re not moving whole departments holus-bolus from Yellowknife to a small, isolated community. We are taking a very strategic, measured approach so that at the end of the day when we have completed decentralization, decentralization will continue into the near future, at least the next two or three years, that we’ll see that decentralization has been very successful in the Northwest Territories.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
