Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to start just by commending the GNWT for some of the creative options it already has such as deferred leave where a worker can take a reduced pay cut for a number of years and then have a year off with leave without pay, or options such as flex days where workers can increase their working hours in a day to get an additional day off. All of which are great programs that cost the GNWT no money but help with retention.
However, Mr. Speaker, I believe we need to go further and try and formalize some policy around a fourday workweek. I have talked to workers who have requested to work four days with the reduced pay cut and have been told no, and those workers have told me they're not already they're already not working full time, Mr. Speaker; they're just sitting in a chair, and I don't see why we wouldn't approve them to get that time off. So I think there's a number of different ways to do this but we need to review our policies.
And my question for the Minister of Finance is whether we will review our current leave policies with the aim of allowing more workers to work a fourday workweek? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Minister responsible for Finance.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, when I heard the Member's statement earlier, I already had a thought of pointing out the fact that there's the ability to work a compressed schedule already. There's the work the ability to work a flex schedule already. There's the ability to look at, you know, having deferred leave. There's actually a very flexible set of opportunities in many regards for the employees in the public service. So, you know, whether it's a question of there being some specific employees who may have requested access to some of those programs and being denied, those specific requests should probably come in so that they can be examined individually. I'm not sure that this is necessarily the time to say that the entire system itself isn't being flexible enough when, as I've just noted and as the Member already said, there's quite a number of flexible opportunities already in existence.
At the end of the day, there's operational needs. Some positions aren't going to have the operational capacity to be as flexible as others. Again, I can't say whether or not those are the examples that are being provided here by the Member. But that's always going to have to be an examinations that fundamentally we need to make sure we're providing our programs and services and providing the positions and the staff to do so. But beyond that, Mr. Speaker, we have quite a flexible array of options already and would encourage people to make use of them. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate that and, you know, I get that certain positions perhaps need the oneoff policy, but I think we could really be a leader here and we could find positions and pilot a fourday workweek. Perhaps it's a it's a summer Fridays model, which is becoming more common. And then I think we would need to do it as a pilot project and evaluate things such as, you know, were less sick days taken; was there a decline in productivity. I know many workplaces have actually found that it would increase in productivity when shifting to a fourday workweek. So I think we need to be a little bit more conscious of how we are granting that leave to people. And so my question for the Minister of Finance is could we find some units or some appropriate positions and pilot a fourday workweek? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's no plans right now to be piloting a fourday workweek. There are plans right now and work underway to develop a GNWTwide public service strategy, government you know, human resources strategy. So to the extent that we'll be engaging and available to members of the public service to have feedback and to discuss where and what they see as some of the challenges in terms of our you know, whether it's morale, whether it's opportunities to be better engaged, whether there's learning plans, whether there's other options, you know, that that's the kind of feedback I'm interested to hear. I am not as I say, right this moment, there's not a plan to introduce a pilot workweek other than to say that I would certainly encourage folks who are thinking about flexibility to look at the programs that exist and to make those requests, and that might be a good initial step to make sure that they're accessing the programs that are already there. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
