Thank you, Mr. Chairman. When I started speaking today, I indicated that the Government Operations Committee adopted this report. I did not indicate that the people who worked on the report endorsed every word. I am glad that Mr. Henry reminded me that he did have a minority opinion on several areas and it is in here. But if we go back to Hansard, I am sure people would also know that Mr. Henry has consistently spoken against affirmative action so it should come as no surprise. Although we welcome his comments in our deliberations, it is always good to have two points of view when you are trying to come up with a report or struggle through issues.
Similar to Mr. Miltenberger, I want to stress that we are not talking about filling positions by aboriginal people, or northerners, or women, or whomever just for the sake of filling positions. We are talking about people having to be qualified first. That is the way it is supposed to be today and that is the way we envision it in the future, that people should be qualified for a position before they are even interviewed unless they are very, very close. If they are very close then perhaps they can be interviewed and if they show they can handle the job with very minimal training then perhaps we can fill that way also but people have to be qualified first. They have to indicate they can handle the position. We are not talking about hiring people just because of their colour, we are talking about merit all the way through.
On the issue of basing affirmative action on the labour force instead of the population, Mr. Chairman, the simple answer to that is we are talking about a workforce that is representative of the people it serves, not representative of the people who are of working age or not even of working age but who decide that they want to work.
-- Applause
There are many people out there who do not work but they are still people. We are talking about the public service being representative of the people it serves.
There was also mention about there are areas where representation has gone way over. Yes, I have to agree that there were a couple of areas. One of them was DPW and what did we do? We fired everybody in there that was affirmative action, basically. I should not say we fired, I guess we laid them off so that area no longer exists. There are obviously areas where there are no qualified people and we are not saying to hire unqualified people to fill those areas. We are saying that if there are no qualified people in that area to fill those breaches then you simply have to wait. The affirmative action goal will not be filled until there are qualified people to fill that breach. You just cannot simply say that because we do not have qualified people that all we are going to do is educate people. You have to put both into place, affirmative action as well as the educational plan. At the same time, you cannot just say well, we are going to educate the kids and forget about the adults. You have to do both as well. You have to educate the young people as well as the people who are currently adults so that they, too, can get an opportunity at jobs and we can get them off the welfare lines as well as everybody else.
Mr. Chairman, I guess if I have the concluding remarks, then that concludes the standing committee's comments and review of this report and I would therefore move that the Premier provide a report to the Standing Committee on Government Operations by September 22, 1997 outlining the government's response and action taken with respect to the recommendations contained in this report. Thank you.