Mr. Speaker, reductions and layoffs are never a pleasant experience. However, there are ways of mitigating the impact and making it at least professional, businesslike and somewhat humane.
I’ll give you another example of a situation where we’re going to reduce positions. There are four people in one shop, all doing basically the same activity. Now the government says they only want three people. So rather than going to the person in that shop who’s got 28 years’ experience and suggesting maybe coming up with some arrangement, like a normal employer would do.... Why would you send notification to all four employees and ask them all to apply for the job, knowing for months that one of them at the end of the day isn’t going to have their job? That is another example of a very unprofessional way of approaching these job reductions. I resent that, and I ask the Premier if he would respond to that kind of treatment of our respected members of the public service.