Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to throw a few single words out there that the government might want to consider when trying to recruit people for the 800 vacant positions and how we are going to get Northerners first and foremost into those positions and, secondly, how we could attract other people to come here. Let me throw a few of those out: mentoring, sponsorship, job shadowing, transfer assignment, succession planning, partnerships with the private sector, tracking our students when they’re out there, forecasting labour market trends in the Northwest Territories so we can tell students even when they’re in high school what kinds of positions we’re going to have a shortage of going forward, scholarship, loan forgiveness. If we lose $25,000 for every student that doesn’t come back to the Northwest Territories – at least $25,000 and probably more once they get established and start a family and so on – what are we doing with their loans, the debt? That’s what you hear down south all the time. The biggest burden for post-secondary, after people graduate from university with an education, is starting off life with these incredible education debts. We should get ahead of the ball here and try to think about doing something, knowing full well that if we don’t get our population up, that grant from Canada is just going to keep going down.
I’d like to ask the Minister of Finance, on the 800 vacant positions, how many of those are inactive and how many of them are we actively trying to recruit people into?