Thank you, Madam Chair. The lead on dealing with the devolution is the Executive. There is a committee of deputy heads working with the lead deputy in the Executive to figure out what the organization is going to look like in the future, and what departments may exist, what departments may not exist, the roles and responsibilities of the individual departments. HR is providing technical advice on job description writing, organizational design structure, but it is being led by the Executive. We are providing solid HR advice and recommendations in that area.

When it comes to the number of positions, I think it’s over 300 positions that will be coming to the Northwest Territories. Speculation on how many individual people that might be, I’ve heard numbers as high as 170, but I think it’s a little premature to say for sure exactly how many employees will be coming over, because we don’t know who’s going to say yea and who’s going to say nay. But we need to be ready to bring employees in.

The Department of Human Resources has dealt with decentralized federal positions before. There are processes we have to go through, and through the devolution negotiations we’ve committed to protecting the employees that come over, to make sure that they’re not adversely affected by becoming employees of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

So once the Devolution Agreement is signed off and concluded, we’ll kick into high gear and try and process the individuals coming over. We have done a lot of initial research on steps that will need to be taken to protect those employees, without creating any undue or unfair systems within the Government of the Northwest Territories. We are providing technical expertise and we are facilitating the transfer of individuals. The design is being facilitated by the Executive on what the government is going to look for, and we are a partner in that.