Mr. Speaker, I believe that this budget process has eroded public confidence. Unfortunately, people out there in the public don’t always differentiate between that side of the House and this side of the House. To them we are all the government. So I am feeling, as well, like we have been not fully brought into this whole process.
I did sit beside the Premier when we announced that we need to live within our means and we need to have affordable, sustainable government, and I believed in all that. But when it came down to the decisions on how we were going to attain that, then we weren’t part of the discussion.
I know the Premier has already said, Mr. Speaker, that he is sorry that Members weren’t notified before the 135 letters went out to potentially affected employees to set up interviews to discuss their options with them. But I want to stress, I guess, that I didn’t get here yesterday. I’ve been here a long time, and I know what normal practice is. I don’t have any motivation to just be crabby for the sake of being crabby. I don’t. I mean, if things are good, I say things are good. If things are screwed up, I say things are screwed up. And this budget process has not been what it should have been.
On the recruitment and retention reference in the Budget Address, we stand up and say that we’re not the employer of choice. Well, I guess not. I mean, here we are out here trying to spend money on recruitment and retention, yet we’re laying off 135 — with vacant positions maybe 200 — positions in the public service. I want to ask the Premier: what efforts were made to redeploy, reassign or come up with reasonable circumstances for those members of the public service we have had working for us, who have skills, who have possibly transferable skills, who we
have invested in and who have invested their work careers in us as a territorial government. What efforts were made?