Mr. Chairman, I guess we have to recognize the perception that without the aboriginal levels of employment in areas of government, we’d be seen as being complacent or not truly representing the population. The fact is, though, we have a lot of people who are dedicated to the work they’re doing and trying to get it done.
We do have the affirmative action policy. Yes, when you look at the numbers, there needs to be improvement. Previous governments have tried to deal with that as well. In fact, the current Minister of Human Resources is, I believe, having some dialogue with Members to see if Members are looking at a new program that would look at the affirmative action policy — an employment inequity piece that would, again, look at ways of trying to increase our numbers.
The other thing is, when it comes to some of these areas of policy — writing the policy, the legal end of interpretation and so on — we definitely need to encourage some of our young people and aboriginal population to get into those lines of education, so they can end up taking over these critical areas. I think we can throw in a number of departments through the hiring of staff and slowly moving them up to senior management and further education improvements through our normal process. We’ve made some inroads there, but definitely there needs to be more improvement.
In fact, Mr. Chairman, when I share this with people back home in the constituency and others when we get talking about this topic…. We need to find more of our young students who would enter into this field of policy and, I guess, the work that makes government happen in this area. We don’t have, even, a lot of our high school graduates who would consider this to be a career avenue. But I tell people that if you really want to make a difference, this is the area you should get involved in. Hopefully, we can have more and more students go down that avenue.