I hear the Member loud and clear. The Regional Recruitment Strategy is one of the things that we have been talking about to start addressing these particular challenges. We are talking about on-the-job training and other opportunities for youth, but not just youth, people who are interested in becoming employees of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

For students, there is a significant amount out there and I think Education, Culture and Employment does provide some fantastic student loans that will help individuals fund their way through college or university. But when individuals come back, we’ve already had internship programs to put youth/returning students in jobs to give them an opportunity to consolidate their learning on the job, which will give them the skills they need to apply on any job they wish to apply on in the future. We’ve had some pretty good successes with the

Internship Program. We want to continue to run the Internship Program.

We’ve also been very, very proactive and working really hard to hire summer students when they come back. This past year was the highest number of students we ever hired. I say that with caution, obviously, because we can’t guarantee that we’ll always be able to get the same number of students. Money and work does play a factor and it’s going to get tougher and tougher to increase those numbers, but we’ll work as hard as we can to employ as many students as we can reasonably hire. That’s a great opportunity for students to consolidate some of their learning, develop some skills that will be useful when they are applying for jobs in the future.

I talked already about the Regional Recruitment Strategy and some of the on-the-job training programs that are there for both non-statutory as well as statutory jobs. These are all things that I think can really help individuals who may lack an education but have the ability to do work and specific work. I’ll give you an example. Many, many years ago, one of my first jobs in the Government of the Northwest Territories was an on-the-job training program, an affirmative action on-the-job training program. By developing profiles and strict training plans and double filling positions with Aboriginal candidates, we were graduating 30, 34 Aboriginal candidates into meaningful high-end jobs on an annual basis. We had an 84 percent success rate. We know it will work. I think it’s time for us to look at that model again.