Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wondered if I could find out how many regional offices there are for HR. I thought somebody had told me that there was only one in Fort Smith, but if I could have that confirmed, please.

Mr. Chair, we have seven regional offices in the Northwest Territories.

Other questions? Ms. Bisaro.

Thanks. I guess just to follow-up: are there human resources services in each of those regional offices?

Mr. Chair, we provide human resource services out of all of the offices. Some may not provide as many services as others, depending on the location. Generally, the larger regional centres are full service, but the smaller ones may not be as full service.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At headquarters are 120 indeterminate full-time positions. I’d like to ask the Minister if the core business of the Department of Human Resources could be managed with less than 120 people in headquarters. What process was undertaken by his department to determine whether more positions at headquarters could be reduced, or were they just responding to targets that were given to them externally?

Mr. Chair, I guess the best way to respond to that is that I think the number of positions at headquarters goes up and down depending on the staff that we have at the regional level. As much as possible, we like to have the services provided at the regional level, but on occasion we have staff who leave, and it takes some time to replace them, so that has impact on the headquarters level. As far as the reductions go, I think the approach that we took, our first cut at it, was to look at the vacant positions that we had in the department. That’s how we approached it.

Mr. Chairman, certainly in fairness to the people who work there…. Looking at the vacant positions, I agree with this, but I don’t think that’s going far enough. I think, again, it comes back to this issue of program review and looking at the effectiveness and efficiency of the methods by which we deliver those programs. One hundred and twenty people in headquarters is a lot of positions. I guess I’m just concerned about doing things the same old way and kind of status quo, and when a reduction target comes up, it’s not looked at in that in-depth way that a program review or maybe an outside objective set of eyes would look at the path that’s performed. Maybe I am not doing a very good job of describing this.

It doesn’t seem like people from within the department themselves would necessarily have any incentive or motivation at looking at how they could do the same function and do it with more efficiency and less people. I mean, what incentive do people have to do that? So we get an external target reduction and you say, “Oh, we’ve got some vacant

positions; let’s offer that up.” That seems very shallow to me. In the Alberta government they used to have one deputy minister, who had a nickname, who would go around and be put in a department and look for every efficiency possible. People knew that when that deputy came to their department, they were looking at streamlining operations and saving money.

I don’t know if it would take something like this to get those kinds of results. I mean, as a Member I’m all about wanting to do things in a cost-effective and efficient way, and what I’m seeing here, very much, is the status quo.

Can the Minister provide me with any assurance that he as a leader and being at the helm of this department has any creative or innovative ideas of how the Department of Human Resources could be better managed?

Certainly we have a number of different approaches we would like to take. What we are starting to realize is that it’s becoming harder and harder for us to staff HR positions with people with HR backgrounds. We are finding we have to spend more time in training. We want to focus more on working with the departments that have the delegated authority to hire. So we want to work more closely with them so we provide better service levels. We had to pull some services that were done at the regions into headquarters in order to deal with some processing problems or issues. We want to spend more time on training and developing capacity so we can put those services back out into the regions.

We also agree with the Member. We want to do a review of the workload and positions within the departments in the regions to assess if they’re located in the right place and doing the right things and if we have enough people to do the jobs they would have been asked to do.

Mr. Abernethy.

Thank you.My question is similar to the one that Mrs. Groenewegen just asked. Specifically, I am interested, actually, to hear some examples of the types of things you’d try to do to streamline the organization to find some efficiencies. There are large organizations out there with far more staff than the GNWT, and they run their organizations in such a way that staff get paid on time, labour relations are dealt with in a timely manner, and training and development is seen, recognized and delivered. Succession planning’s a reality.

I am not saying those things aren’t a reality with the GNWT, but we have a very large HR unit compared to some of these large international and national corporations. I’m wondering if there’s been any research done into sound business practices on

how best to deliver human resource services and find those efficiencies and increase productivity within the organization itself. This is without necessarily resulting in additional job cuts within the department itself but maybe reorganizing or restructuring a little bit so we’re able to provide services in a timely and effective manner. Specifically, if you can walk us through some of the best practices you guys have been researching in order to find greater efficiencies.

Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess we’ve been looking at it from a number of different ways. I don’t want to go back in history, but we do have the Hackett report, where we looked at all of the areas we were functioning in to see what we could improve on.

We’ve also looked at self-servicing. I guess we see that as a way to improve services to reduce the number of people we need to do the job. We’re finding that we’re having to run competitions quite a few times in order to be able to attract people to come to work for the Government of the Northwest Territories.

This is an area we’re looking at, that we’re putting focus on, and we’ve been able to reduce the time it takes to fill a competition from ten weeks to eight weeks.

There are a number of those areas we’re looking at. Certainly, with the change in demographics, not only in the Northwest Territories but, I guess, all across Canada and the world, we find that we need to change the way we recruit and staff so we can attract younger people to come to work for the Government of the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr.

McLeod. Seeing no further questions on pages 2-52 and 2-53, we’ll move to our first votable item. Sorry. Mr. McLeod.

Mr. Chair, the decisions to decide which employees were to be potentially affected within HR — and this is a question I’ll probably ask each department. Who made the decisions as to which employees would be affected employees? Who made that decision?

We had targets, and we asked the management to identify the positions. We were working under the direction that we were to minimize person-year reductions as much as possible. So we decided we would use vacant positions to fill our reductions for the Department of HR.

The Minister is telling me they were given a target — I’m assuming it’s by Cabinet — to meet the reductions. The Minister also said they

decided to just go with the vacant positions. So I’m to understand there were absolutely no filled positions within HR that were affected. Am I correct?

That’s correct.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Follow-up, Mr. Robert McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I find it kind of odd that we propose to eliminate 135 positions from GNWT territory-wide, yet not one person in HR is affected other than vacant positions, which don’t mean much because they’re vacant anyway. So, actually, HR didn’t lose anybody, other than vacant positions. We still sent out letters to 135 affected employees. I think any percentage that our public service goes down by, HR should automatically go down by the same amount.

That was just a comment, Mr. Chair. There was no question there.

I just wanted to clarify that although there may have been vacant positions that were put forward for reductions, the resources that were used to fund those positions would be removed from the HR budget as well.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Yes, Mr. Robert McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just one more. I would like to ask the Minister if those four vacant positions that were terminated and that really had no effect on anyone because they were vacant, as I said.… I’d like to ask the Minister if there were more positions that were maybe put forward for reductions but not accepted.