The Management Assignment Program is for employees who are already in the G.N.W.T. public service. The intern program, although it’s a very good program and does have a significant amount of value, does actually focus mostly on Yellowknife, as most of the people want to come back to Yellowknife. I’m more interested in a program such as the PSCTP, when it did exist prior to the cuts in ’96, that gave people from the smaller communities and the regional centres an opportunity to get into the public service — where they didn’t have the education necessarily to allow them to be screened into competitions, but they could demonstrate skills and abilities in other ways that, with minimal training, they would be able to take on more advanced roles such as officer-level jobs or management jobs.
To the Minister specifically: can I get the Minister to commit to reviewing a program like the Public Service Career Training Program with the intent of implementing something that would benefit those potential employees who are not already working for the G.N.W.T. public service — those individuals from the communities who will work up and stay in the communities once they complete their training?