Mr. Chairman, at least two other Members have brought to the floor this aspect of hiring and the practice where the new departments here are seeking to staff new superintendents initially, and this is my understanding, by only casting the net among our indeterminate employees. The situation has been reflected by my colleagues, but I do want to add my voice to this, Mr. Chairman, just to make sure that this department and others know that, like Ms. Lee, I agree that we are inappropriately restricting at least our initial search to only indeterminate employees.
One thing that we maybe aren't appreciating well enough here is that the competitive environment for good, qualified people is extremely vigorous in the Northwest Territories. An employee who may be interested in looking elsewhere is going to have lots of temptation out there every day for other places to go to work; other levels of government. Certainly, industry is offering some pretty tempting employment packages.
We know we need to build our own workforce, especially here in this case when we're rebuilding these departments, and yet we are using an older approach to hiring to get people into these positions. I think we're leaving ourselves exposed to other employers. There are employees within our grasp, those term and casual employees who cannot apply for these positions just may get picked off and attracted elsewhere.
So, Mr. Chairman, we're not being as aggressive, as inclusive and as open as we should be to building our workforce. Certainly, where there may be those casual or term employees who are in a department because they want to be there and who are hoping for indeterminate jobs. We're cutting them out of the loop, if you will.
So I don't know if I've brought anything new to the floor, Mr. Chairman, but I at least wanted to add my voice to this policy which, I think, is not at all appropriate for our times or our situation, and we should open up hiring practices to
every possible candidate that we can. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.