Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My concern today is how to maintain, enhance and improve our professional workforce. Specifically in two of our front-line professions: teaching and nursing. Both professions continue to provide services to the public while facing employer-imposed hardships - inadequate wages, reduced benefits, substandard housing, and stressful working conditions.

These translate into challenges with retaining and recruiting teachers and health care workers in the north. For both teaching and nursing positions, the vacancy rates over the last few years have been in the neighbourhood of 20 - 25 percent. That is three to four times the expected vacancy rate of seven percent. That sort of vacancy and resultant turnover rate points to a crisis situation.

Both professions show the same three major causes for the high staff turnover: inadequate wages and benefits, substandard housing and stressful working conditions as I mentioned earlier. The stressful working conditions which nurses and teachers face every day are partly due to high staff turnover, but also relate to increased demands for services.

More and more of our nurses are taking on duties that normally would be a doctor's responsibility. Although they are to be commended for this, it is a tremendous workload that demands more skills and work experience. Whether our nurses can adequately handle this added stress is one question, but the other question is, are they being fairly compensated? Are we paying them nurses' wages for doing a physician's work?

Pat Thomas, President of the NWT Teacher's Association, in the association's fall newsletter, says that teachers are already feeling stressed and burnt out in September. Large class sizes, lack of teacher and student supports contribute to this situation, but also there are increasing incidents of student behaviour problems and harassment incidents.

--Applause