Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The development of our staff is really important to us because we know that we have a lot of workers who haven't been able to go beyond the diploma program at the college. One of the things that will be a priority for us over the coming year in the development of our human resource plan, is to assess the social services worker program at the college to see whether there does have to be changes made to it.
There have been changes made over the years to keep up with the professional needs of social workers, but the program provides our workers with a base to start at the community level. What we want to do is work with the college to bring in some field-based courses for the people who only have a diploma and who want to go on and get their undergraduate degrees or specialized training that can be provided by the college in some of the regional centres, rather than having to send people to universities in southern Canada.
It's especially difficult for workers who have large families and who can't really leave either their region or their home communities. We're looking at ways and means to bring those courses closer to home so there can be some ongoing professional development of the workers, rather than simply dead-ending them at the diploma level. We have a variety of ways of doing that. One is we can send people out on the education leave program, but we haven't made good use of that over the years. There are many flexibilities in the collective agreement that allow us to give people leave with pay for shorter periods of time, up to six months. It should give them the opportunity to complete courses or parts of a program that would improve their academic standing. That is on the books for the coming year.