Mr. Speaker, I as well have not just come into this environment. As I stated earlier, I’m very familiar with the process as a Regular Member, as a Minister and as Finance Minister in a previous government. That process has been followed. There’s always a glitch with the first budget of the Legislative Assembly. You can decide to either go ahead with the work that was done by a previous government, with some tinkering, or you can take control of it early on. We’ve decided to take control.
We’ve tried to mitigate the impact on employees. Again, I’ve heard from Members. Members said early on that to minimize that to the least extent possible, if it has to be done, you notify early. We’ve done that, and it was a mistake in not providing Members the information as that was happening. So we’ve dealt with that, and that won’t be occurring again.
The other side is that we’ve gone through our staff retention policy, and the Minister of Human Resources has been keeping us up to date on the number of employees who have been interviewed for potential redeployment within government, taking on new assignments. We’ve had some individuals in the system say, “We’re not ready to talk just yet until we see that the budget actually passes.” Then they’ll be sitting down with us.
We have quite a large number who have talked about retirement. They’ve hit a threshold where they’re considering doing that. We’re looking at our options to deal with that and pension issues. So we’re looking at a number of options to mitigate the final impact on individuals within the Government of Northwest Territories.