Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to follow up on questions that my colleague from Kam Lake was asking the Minister of Human Resources on affirmative action.
In the Minister's response he indicated that the Public Service Career Training Program had disappeared. It was a program that was being utilized to help aboriginal people with technical skills but who lacked education transition into employment at officer- and management-level jobs. The program, the PSCTP, had an 84 per cent success rate and was graduating 30-plus aboriginal people a year into meaningful jobs in the public service. It’s gone, because in 1996 the budget cuts resulted in the elimination of the program. So we took a program that worked and eliminated it, and now we've been stagnant at 31 per cent.
Given that the program is successful, I'd like the Minister responsible for Human Resources to commit to conducting a review of the program that did exist and possibly re-implementing it in order to ensure that we have a tool that is there and available for aboriginal people in the North who have technical skills but lack education to transition into officer-level and management-level jobs in the Government of the Northwest Territories.