Thank you. I would like to thank the deputy for that. I think it is critical that not only is this program and this pot of money administered from the Department of the Executive, but work is done at the line department level, because really when it comes down to it, that is where the bulk of the positions will be. If they feel it is too difficult to access the funding or there are too many conditions placed on the funding, they simply will not bother. The motivation has to be there at the departmental level or our public service will simply suffer.
She also mentioned hoping that the Government of the Northwest Territories would become an employer of choice, and I agree that is something that we need to strive for. I think one of the things I would like to reference is that we start our residents here and we invest a lot of money in them through the years, and presumably we send them away to university with adequate student financial assistance, and then we bring them back and we hope to find employment for them. Obviously, the main employer in the Northwest Territories is the government.
Students are finding it difficult to access summer employment in some areas, harder in some areas more so than in others. There are cases that students feel that they go away to school, get their education and come back here and there is no employment for them, or the government does not do enough to help them find employment. I do not think that anybody is looking for a handout here, or a guaranteed job or anything like that, but I think the people that we invest all this money and time in, and the people who grew up here, those are the people that we can count on staying here. I think it makes a lot more sense to devote attention and time to these kind of people than to worry about trying to recruit people and import the talent we need. So when we do have homegrown talent, I think it is important that we employ them. The Government of the Northwest Territories is a major employer.
I was encouraged to hear that there was a student working group set up on student and graduate employment underneath the umbrella of the corporate human resource services. I do not mean to be too detailed, here but I hope the Premier can give me some indication of why this working group was set up, how he sees it going forward, and if there have been any results to this time. Thank you.