Thank you, Madam Chair. The Department of Human Resources centralized a number of years ago, but with that centralization, the staffing procedures and rules that the GNWT is bound to did not change. Those are consistent prior to decentralization. What may have been happening prior to that is some departments may not have been applying the rules as intended.
I hear the Member and I’ve seen many of the issues come across my desk and I do see a significant amount of frustration out there, which is one of the conversations I had with the Aboriginal Employees Advisory Committee. What is happening within our system that either discourages people from applying or eliminates people who probably could do the job? What is it in our system that is causing that? I’m looking forward to some advice and recommendations from the Aboriginal Employees Advisory Committee on how we can overcome that barrier, but we’re also, and I’ve talked about it already, putting in the Regional Recruitment Strategy which is going to focus on those two sectors, non-regulated and regulated jobs. For the non-regulated, training on the job, bringing people in who appear to be on the right track, but maybe lack something in their resume or maybe didn’t score exactly high enough on their interview to double fill and give them an opportunity to train on the job. Those are the types of things we’re talking about and I think that will address some of the issues that these individuals have.
An interesting statistic for people to consider is since 1999, the GNWT workforce has grown by about 36.9 percent. The growth in Aboriginal employees in that same time within the public service is 39.6. So where we have the workforce growing like this, we have the Aboriginal representation growing at a faster rate. We haven’t got where we need to be, we’re not even close. I think we’re at about 37 percent right now and the population is 50. So a significant amount of work is still needing to be done, but we are seeing some successes in the things we are doing. We have to capitalize on our successes. To you and to all Members and to residents-at-large, if you’re applying on a job and you feel that something was wrong in the process, you have the right to appeal. I encourage employees to appeal when, in fact, they
feel that something was done incorrectly in the process or that they were unsuccessful for a particular reason. So I encourage people to appeal because that helps us learn where there may be gaps in the system as well.
So we do have work to do. I hear you, and I think we’re making progress, and I look forward to continual recommendations and suggestions from committee, from the Aboriginal Employees Advisory Committee and from the public-at-large to help us overcome some of these challenges that we’re facing.
Just in closing, I’ve been strongly advocating within the department and directing the department to tell candidates, you know, come to us and we’ll give you feedback on what you could do better, where you might have gone off the rails a little bit during this competition. We want to help people learn from the staffing process, we want to give them advice on how they can better the process, and we’re also going to be looking at the possibilities of providing training outside of Yellowknife to individuals on how the process works. Sometimes I fear that it might just be a simple lack of understanding about how a competition works within the Government of the Northwest Territories and I think we can do a better job of helping people understand that process in the Northwest Territories on behalf of the GNWT.