Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll be voting in favour of this motion. I think if the Minister talks about a plan…. Well, this is our way of helping you with the plan, by making sure the money’s there for those positions. I’d like to think we’re doing our part by helping the Minister and the department. If they’re unable to fill them, I mean, heck, the money
will just lapse and nothing will change. The issue of what we’re doing is making sure that’s available.
My suggestion, of course, is to back up…. I should say I support local training of potentially either one person, or two people, obviously, in this situation. The problem I see is that it’s difficult to, all of a sudden, tell someone, whether they’re from southern Canada or somewhere in the NWT, to just show up in these communities and, all of a sudden, “You’re now a community member.”
It’s a challenge to move into these areas. I would hope that a lot of weight is put to possibly finding a couple of responsible people in that area and seeing if they’d be interested in training, and maybe we could mentor them into these types of positions. It’s always been my experience that if you can find someone from an area, if they have some type of roots and reason to be there, they’ll probably stay there for life if we’ve given them that opportunity.
People are always appreciative of having a job and feeling as if they’ve made a contribution. I think these jobs are the types of things that would allow that. These communities are hard enough to staff, as emphasized already, and I think every government opportunity in there helps. Government-paying jobs help these small communities get through. The challenge there is, of course, keeping employment in the community, but getting employment is just as hard as keeping it there. I’ll be supporting this, recognizing the struggle some of these small communities go through.