Mr. Chairman, I didn’t think Donnie Days fell under this, but another Member raised it and I just want to seek some clarity, if I can, because the Minister did respond to those questions earlier. My area of concern, just for clarity, is: does the contribution a member pays into Donnie Days — in other words, they get reduced salary but theoretically take those days off with pay…. How does that affect students, terms and casuals? Would they pay into that reduced-salary pool, which would theoretically guarantee them those days? Or are they losing salary? And if they are, is there a way for them to recoup that potential loss? I ask because they don’t necessarily qualify for those days.

Mr. Chair, the way it works for full-time indeterminate employees is the reduction is taken off the top, and then the employees are paid over the 12 months of the year, so they really don’t notice the difference.

For casuals and summer students who work less than four months, it doesn’t apply to them.

Mr. Chairman, in this section, you do supports for human resources planning and employee recognition. I’m wondering how much work has been done in this section to date. I don’t want to go back to its fruition or over the last 20 years, but how much work is being done to identify employees who are in the twilight of their career? When I describe it that way, let’s make the assumption that they’re a short couple of years away from retiring, so that’s the type of people I refer to as “twilight.” How much work under the resource planning area are you doing to recognize that type of staff and that number of staff?

Mr.

Chair, we have an

employee recognition program that recognizes staff when they achieve certain levels of service in terms of longevity.

We also have an employee recognition program where employees or teams can be recognized by their peers. We call it the Premier’s Awards of Excellence. We provide for long-service awards for each department on an annual basis.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that detail from the Minister. If he could provide some further detail: when we have a section described as supports for human resource planning in the management and the recruitment services area, that would be part of their duties. I’m just trying to get a sense of identification. What work are they doing to help identify those folks who are defined as being in the twilight portion of their career, in the context of numbers? Were they followed in departments, in the sense of how many employees have one year left, how many have two years left, in the sense of the description of those who are looking at short days?

Ms. Alexander.

Thank you,

Ms. Alexander. Next on my list, I have Mr. Ramsay, Mr. Beaulieu and Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Ramsay.

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?

Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Mr.

Chair, we have been working on the

development of a comprehensive human resource plan. I think we have a number of drafts. We have a deputy minister–level human resource committee that works with our department, and it’s something we’ll be putting a lot more effort into completing.

We have been spending a lot of time on modelling with regard to trying to determine what the impacts of self-government and land claims will be in the event that — when and if — aboriginal governments start to draw down on the delivery of programs and services. We’ve been in discussions with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations and others — the Department of Executive — to talk about how self-government would affect us.

Part of our delays in dealing with the impact of self-government on the Government of the Northwest Territories was the fact that we needed some clear indication from the federal government with regard to the Labour Code of Canada, as to whether successor rights would have to be extended to GNWT employees who go to work for aboriginal governments when programs are drawn down and delivered by aboriginal self-governments.

Those are areas that are starting to take form and will certainly be a large part in the human resource strategy we will be developing.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for that. I think it is only a matter of time before the aboriginal governments that are out there, and the ones that are going to settle land claims, begin drawing down their authorities and powers under the land claim agreements.

Any work the Government of the Northwest Territories can do at the onset, and that’s today…. If there’s some work already been done…. I think the more work we do in this regard, the better off we’ll be tomorrow in an effort to save us resources.

And that’s just the thing, Mr. Chairman: resources are scarce. In a territory the size of the Northwest Territories, with a population of 42,000 people, we can’t afford to duplicate efforts in looking after our people, whether it’s an aboriginal government or the GNWT. We need to be on the same page when it comes to delivering services for the people we represent.

I want to thank the Minister for his response and I certainly would…. I know I haven’t seen any of this type of work come through any committee I’ve been involved in, and I’d certainly like to see where that work is at. If the Minister could share some work with committee, I’d certainly like to see it.

The other question I have, before I wrap this up: I’d like to know if the government has any type of idea about how many unfunded positions there are government-wide. I think there were 26 just at Stanton alone. What is our strategy to deal with unfunded positions?

Acting Deputy Minister Ms. Alexander.

Sorry, Mr.

Chair. This is

something we try to deal with on a regular basis. For administrative ease — and dealing with some of the ins and outs of staffing and people moving and people going on transfer assignments — it’s a lot easier, at times, to create positions. Generally, as a department, we work with all of the departments to try to clean that up on an annual basis, so we go through and eliminate these vacant positions that are just on the books. They’re not really doing anything, they’re not costing us anything; it just makes it a lot cleaner, administratively, to remove them from the books.

Mr. Chairman, I’m not talking about actual vacant positions. I’m talking about unfunded positions that actually have bodies, warm bodies, in positions that are unfunded. There’s nothing on the books for these positions, yet they exist and they have people in them. Like I said, there are 26 at Stanton. I’m wondering if the Minister knows how many positions are like that throughout the government’s workforce.

Mr. Chair, this is something that…. I

think every department has unfunded

positions, and different departments take different approaches to it. Some departments only cost out positions at 75 per cent or 80 per cent; other departments just rely solely on turnover in staff. As a government, I think, we have 20

per

cent

turnover. Sorry; I stand corrected. It’s 14.2 per cent turnover, so you can generally count on at least that

much. As another rule of thumb, generally some departments sort of go with about 10

per

cent

unfunded positions.

We’ve been trying to stay on top of it, but I don’t think we know exactly how many unfunded, staffed or filled positions we have within the government.

Mr.

Chairman, that’s information

I could get a later time. If the Minister doesn’t have that at his disposal, that’s fine.

One other thing before I go — I’ve got a minute left. I just wanted to touch on the Hackett Report. One thing that was contained in the Hackett Report was…. When they looked at the business processes at the Department of Human Resources, one of the things that stuck out for me was, in an organization comparable in size to the GNWT they would need four times fewer employees to deliver services to the workforce. That always stuck in my mind. If a comparable-sized organization can deliver the services, and deliver them effectively, with a third less of the workforce, then what are we doing? And how are we addressing that?

If we can take a look at this area, I think it’s something we should be doing. We’re going to self-service; we’re going to self-reporting. Maybe there are ways and means. Again, this gets back to that analysis we talked about. If there is an analysis out there, and we can reduce in certain areas, and we can make a case for it, then that’s something I’d be willing to look at.

Maybe I could ask the Minister what plans they have in that department, in Human Resources, to take a look at that Hackett Report and try to compare themselves to other organizations of similar size and how they’re delivering services to the clients.

Mr. Chairman, as I recall, the Hackett Report — and I’d have to look at it in more detail — when comparing to other organizations…. I

think they were comparing it to similar-sized

organizations in the United States, or larger centres that readily have access to fully trained, fully certified human resource professionals and, also, have lighter workloads and variety of job requirements than we have here in the Northwest Territories.

Certainly, that would be an area we would aspire to. I think that if the infrastructure in the Northwest Territories — or the technology — improved so that we could rely a

lot more and be a

lot more

dependent on computer technology and wireless technology, all of those things would go a long way to reducing our human resource requirement.

Also, what we’re finding is that, in the Northwest Territories, we have to spend more time on training and so on. To get to the ultimate, I guess, as the Hackett Report pointed out, we would need a very

stable, highly trained workforce. This is something we’re aspiring to and we’re working toward.

Next on my list I have Mr. Beaulieu and then Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Beaulieu.

Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ve had self-service in place for over a year now. I think it would be worthwhile for us to review it to ensure it’s working properly and also to make sure it’s accurate. We’ve found that after some initial periods of growing pains and getting employees to try it and to realize it wasn’t as hard as it was made out to be — all they had to do was get on-line and start trying it — they could deal with self-service on a regular basis. What we’re hearing is that people on shift work and so on are paid in a more timely and accurate manner. Because of the different things we’re hearing out there, I think it would be worthwhile to do a review.

I don’t think there’s any turning back. The old systems that were in place were customized systems that I don’t think could be resurrected, if we wanted to. I think we’ve got past the point of no return with regard to self-service.

Thank you, Minister. I think the self-service system is more than just pay. I think that’s the only time I’ve heard anything positive said about it: that it’s easy and it’s timely for shift workers to get their pay. There are all kinds of other problems with the system that can’t pick up a person who works through a holiday without that person having to enter into the system and so on.

Also, within the management of the GNWT, unless you have another backup system — a pack of paper system, which is what we had already before we spent all this money on this system — you really can’t keep track of your employees unless you keep going back into the system. It’s time-consuming and not easy to manage. I’m not really seeing this system improve, but I’m not working with it now, either.

From what I hear from GNWT employees, this system is not good. It’s another one of the things, I think, where the government has committed to spending a tremendous amount of money on a system that wasn’t necessary. We have a whole bunch of things like that that have happened in the government, such as TSC and amalgamation of Human Resources — period.

In any event, I want to go on to another line. The Department of Human Resources is providing support for HR planning along the lines of what the Member for Kam Lake was talking about. Specifically, I want to ask the department how many departments in the GNWT actually have comprehensive human resource plans.

I think every department in the past with their business planning has had to have a human resource section, which would lay out statistics and also some other intentions.