Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to welcome the Minister and the delegation, and congratulate the Minister on a very obviously complex couple of months in his honeymoon period. He’s done very, very well in ratifying a lot of our workers out there and I congratulate them and their team.
In terms of general comments before we get into the department, again, earmarking a little bit what was said by the Member for Sahtu, but I’ll try to put my spin on it as well.
Again, depending on how you look at it, cost of living might be the variable here, but we’re seeing an obviously net migration out of the Territories here and we’ve had that happen for a number of years now. I guess whether or not this is due to the complexity of the public service jobs themselves, whether we’re seeing more retirees, we know that’s a factor that we’ve built into the program. But there is an apparent, a very obvious, apparent statement that one can see very, very easily, is that the NWT’s labour market cannot meet the demand to fill the GNWT positions. So this is a critical element in terms of strategy, I’m sure, for your department, one in which I know was addressed in your opening comments to a certain degree. But really looking at the full mandate in terms of dealing with that, it seems to be lacking some specifics in nature. I would probably like to see some comments regarding that.
So what is the department doing to ratify that situation? What is it doing in its communities? What is it doing to prepare Northerners for public service jobs specifically? Where are these schools? Where are these programs? Where are they going to be delivered and how are we going to lure and attract these people from the communities, especially Aboriginal involvement from the communities to seek public sector employment? I think these are very, very key comments and I believe, again, somewhat touched on in the opening address, very little touched into this budget. So I think this is a global position statement, but I believe the Members here deserve to know and I think the people of the Northwest Territories are keenly listening to what’s in store for them in public service jobs.
Last on my list of opening comments, and again touched on, is obviously post-devolution, hopefully a successful post-devolution environment. It mentioned a decentralization of jobs into the rural and remote communities. Again, we continuously ask these questions in committee structure. Again,
we get a variable myriad of responses: it’s being worked on, it’s in the works. But we know that there is a plan, we know that there’s something that is being discussed behind in departments and the membership here would love to hear what those ideas are so we can debate them in the House so we can be a fully able participant in the final draft that will be shared with Northwest Territories residents and not an afterthought. I think this is something that needs to come forth sooner than later. We know how many jobs potentially are created and we’re hearing again from the smaller and remote communities. They need to prepare and plan, they need to plan housing, they need to plan business and office space for these jobs. So there’s lots that has to happen behind the scenes other than just saying so many jobs are going here.
I’ll leave it there, Madam Chair, but again, those are my opening comments for this department. Thank you.