Thank you, Mr. Chair. Very briefly, with regard to the response to the consultation with the Corporate Human Resource Strategy, we were pleasantly surprised with the response from the employees and certainly it will help us have a much better HR strategy. We also held a number of focus groups to make sure that we had input from all the different categories of employees. As well, we’re expecting significant response from the hard copies of the survey that we mailed out. I think we mailed out about 1,800 hard copies.

With regard to increasing the aboriginal representation of senior management, this is an area that we recognize is very important and is something that we feel should be representative of the public service. Currently, the percentage of aboriginals in senior management is at 16 percent. As part of our human resource strategy we will be taking steps to improve on that.

As far as the Aboriginal Employees Advisory Committee, this is very preliminary. We held an initial meeting. It was chaired by the deputy minister of ENR and the associate deputy minister of HR. We had two aboriginal employees from each of the regions and I was very struck by how committed and seriously the participants took this responsibility. As soon as we finalize the terms of reference, we’ll be sharing that with all of the Members.

With regard to the $100,000 for the YK clinic, that’s one-time funding so that we can hire a human resource officer to help with writing job descriptions, dealing with the changes in the UNW Collective Agreement and to help with the competitions to fill these positions.

On the affirmative action targets included in each department, this is something we’ve asked our consultants on the human resource strategic plans

to give us some best practices and guidelines and to help us develop government-wide targets.

With the backlog, we were pleased to get some direction to seek some additional resources through the supplementary funding process, so we hope to deal with the backlog once and for all.

In terms of new hires and recruitment, right now it takes us 10 weeks to staff a position. Our target is eight weeks and again we’ll be looking at best practices or e-recruit or we could even look at the Ontario model where the managers have been given the responsibility to hire. I think we need some checks and balances on that if we are going to meet some of our priorities. Certainly, that’s an area that we’ll be looking at; letting the managers manage. Thank you, Mr. Chair.