Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to provide a few general comments on Human Resources and the Minister’s opening remarks. I always have a concern with the number of people who are in HR headquarters. I look at 120 people in headquarters and 47 out in the regions. To me that just seems like there are too many chiefs and not enough of us. I have a great concern with that.
One of my favourite things back home when I’m talking about this is I’ll tell people to go on the
government directory and go into the HR site. You go into there and you find an Employer of Choice department. I have no idea what they do. Mr. Ramsay said they provide a service. I’m just not sure what it is. I see nine people in there. Total Rewards Planning, another department that I really don’t know what they do. I see they have 18 people in there, so you’re looking at 27 people. I have a concern with that. To me it just seems like too many of the functions of HR are being centralized to headquarters in Yellowknife, and I have a real concern with that.
Mr. Ramsay spoke to the number of managers. I’ve always had a concern with that too. I look at one department where every name there is a manager. I’m not sure, as Mr. Ramsay said, what they manage. To me it seems like when you’re given the title of manager, obviously you’re given the pay of a manager. It seems like there’s just too much at headquarters. I was trying to do the math here. We’ve got 4,700 employees in the public service. We’ve got 167 people in HR. That works out to roughly 25 to 28 people per person at HR. That just seems to be a fairly high number, in my opinion.
I’ve always got concerns. I got an e-mail from someone who left the Northwest Territories probably about two years ago who’s still looking to get their pay. Whatever they had coming, they were still waiting for. They sent me the e-mail. They cc’d a couple of other people, and they got some results probably a little quicker than they normally would have. There was another e-mail from another person who was concerned about some pay that they had coming. Again, working with the Minister we were able to get that resolved fairly quickly.
The point I’m trying to make is that these folks shouldn’t have to resort to sending their MLAs e-mails wondering where their pay is and their ROEs. I think that was one of the issues that one of the folks had. With this many people in headquarters, this many people in HR, our public service shouldn't have to be waiting forever. I know students who work during the summer who three-quarters of the way through the school year still hadn't received their final pay.
So I have a real concern, not just with HR but with most departments, that too many of the positions are in headquarters — too many. I mean, if you look at the overall size of the public service, you're looking at probably over 50 per cent of them in headquarters. I understand that Yellowknife has close to 50 per cent of the population of the Northwest Territories, but still, that doesn't justify having all the positions in headquarters.
You talk about cuts. I see a reduction. You know, we're talking reduction exercise, reduction exercise. But one of the first sentences in the Minister's opening remarks is the word "increase": increase by
2.1 per cent. It seems to me like that’s going against what we're talking about here. We're talking reductions, and I kind of agree that some reductions were needed. We're talking reductions, but reductions where? Reductions out in the communities.
You look at Inuvik. We're losing 34-plus people. That's reductions. I mean, we've lost enough people to make up for a couple other places. The problem I had with this whole reduction exercise right off the bat — other than being told by constituents that they got an affected employee letter, but that's a different story all unto itself — was that I was afraid the people making the decisions to reduce were going to start down here. They were going to work their way from the regions up to headquarters, and when you get here, you realize we've already almost made our quota, so we don't have to eliminate so many people at headquarters. Four. I see four. I see an increase of 2.1 per cent, an increase of $678,000. That kind of money could have probably kept Arctic Tern going for another year, half a year.
This is the first department we're doing. I hope this is not a sign of things to come, where every department that's going to come before us — when we're talking reductions all the time — the first word in their opening remarks is going to be the word "increase." That kind of defeats the whole purpose of this particular budget when you talk reductions, and we're still increasing. We're still getting bigger, and I have a serious concern with it.
I probably will have more questions to the line by line as we go along, because I did commit to going through this whole budget document yesterday. I did commit to going through it line by line and asking as many questions as I can, deleting whatever I think could be deleted, and that's the route that I intend to go with all departments. So thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to make a few opening remarks on the Minister's general comments.