Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple of questions on this section. The first question is: where are we at in terms of the development of a comprehensive human resource strategy government-wide?
I think HR should be the lead department in this, for obvious reasons. I don’t think departments should be going off and haphazardly adding positions in areas of our operation. If we don’t have a comprehensive human resource plan, we don’t
know whether or not we should be hiring more people in the social-envelope areas, or policy analysts in offices in downtown Yellowknife. We haven’t gotten to that level of detail.
We don’t know where we should be growing our operation. We don’t know if we should be looking at scaling back hiring in certain areas. We just let departments do what they want and, to me, that’s not good enough. I think we need a comprehensive human resource plan government-wide — a road map, something to follow.
Especially with the implementation of self-government and land claims, we should be looking at areas of our operation where we can devolve positions to aboriginal governments across the land, and we’re just not doing that type of work. That would come out of a plan. If we had a plan, it would fall out of that.
So the first question I have, Mr. Chairman, is: where are we at in terms of the development of a comprehensive human resource plan?