Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The department has developed a Workforce Planning Strategy across the territory that is designed to fill the positions. Currently, we are looking at each of the vacant positions and why the positions are vacant. Many of them are at the community level, and many times we don’t have the infrastructure to fill those positions, so we are examining an example that I brought forward earlier with the regional recruitment where we might be able to fill the position with an individual that would need approximately one year’s worth of trainings using 20 percent of that individual’s salary to train that individual up to meet the requirements of the position.

Right now, of the 571 positions, 328 of those positions require a university degree, so just that alone can be an issue because most of the people

that live in the Northwest Territories that have university degrees, in fact 97 percent of the people in the Northwest Territories that have university degrees already have jobs, so when you’re trying to fill positions that need university degrees then you have a very small pool to work with that creates one issue. In addition to that, 270 of those positions are located in the regions and the communities and not having the proper infrastructure to attract individuals, such as housing and office space is also an issue.