Yes, thank you. First, what I can do is introduce some of the staff who are working or have worked in the office. I have asked them to come here today just so I can introduce them to you. Perhaps they can stand or wave as I introduce them and then I will explain a little bit about the staff situation during the year and the current situation.
Gwen Ohokak is the executive secretary. Gwen is originally from Cambridge Bay and speaks Innuinaqtun and I stole her from the Department of Health.
Dora Duncan worked as one of the summer students on a research project for us when we were calling many of the organizations in the communities to find out what services were available and what issues they had.
Benoit Boutin is currently working on a contract for me doing a public information package. We are working on everything from a logo to a letterhead, business cards, Christmas cards, posters, brochures, all of that sort of thing.
John Blondin has been working since the summer and will be finished in a couple of weeks. He has been helping us gather the results of the surveys we sent. We have done a number of surveys in the communities and of all the government employees and we have a lot of information. We have 2,000 surveys lying in the office right now and a lot of information to analyze. I think that is all. Is anyone else here? No.
We also had Janice Mathewsie who you might know. She worked for the Legislative Assembly during the summer session and then she came over to my office and worked from July until October. She was working on the telephone survey we were doing of all the organizations in the communities.
Debbi Telgen was a casual secretary to begin with for about a month and a half. Faye Lawrence also helped with a survey in the summer for about a month.
So those are all the people who have been helping me and I would like to say something about the staff situation. In the main estimates, our office is allocated two full-time positions. My position and the executive secretary/administrative assistant position and that is Gwen Ohokak. She started in August. Up to that point I had casual secretaries. I am sorry, I forgot to mention Margaret Petten. She has gone to Ottawa now but she worked for a few months as a casual secretary.
Gwen and I are the only two full-time positions in the office. Aside from that, I was given a quarter of a person year for casual wages. I can report that I have already exceeded that and I think that perhaps you can see why, because we had some initial work to do. We had to gather quite a bit of information because I was not able to just get the information from government departments.
Because my office is at arm's length from the government, I do not have access to all of the information in government departments, so we had to gather some of our own information. I also wanted to gather information that was different in some ways from what the government offices had. So I have exceeded the casual budget but I have not exceeded the total budget for the year yet.
I have asked for another position because I think I need another full-time position; somebody who will assist with the research and with resolving complaints, because I am supposed to cover all of the territories and I have done a fair amount of travelling. There are a couple of regions that I have not been to or I have only been to one community in that region and so I feel that, with all the travelling I am supposed to do and meeting with community groups, to leave Gwen on her own in the office is a bit much and it would mean a lot of complaints and inquiries that come in would have to sit for a long time before they are dealt with.
As it is, I feel that I am slow in dealing with some of those and I would prefer to have more time to pay attention to them and deal with them more quickly, but I have so many things going on. Does that answer your question?