Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to welcome the Department of HR, the Minister, DM and staff here today. I guess, first and foremost, I want to start off by congratulating the department for a well-deserved accolade for the second year in a row under the Canada’s best diversity employers. Again, congratulations. It’s always nice to read about that. I read it in the Globe and Mail the other day, so congratulations to you and your teams for continuing the good work.

I just want to do some general comments here, and some of them might be followed up in detail, but I think it’s prudent for us to talk about some of the areas of opportunity and maybe even point to some of the areas of good work. I’m going to refrain from talking about vacancy positions and things of that nature until we get more into detail or I’ll let my other colleagues dive into it more.

With that, I think, in no particular order, it’s nice to see that recent announcement, due to the fact that our occupational health and safety record was a bit dismal for a number of years. Some of our fines and penalties were in the area of about three-quarters of a million dollars, so it’s nice to see and hear earlier, I believe last fall, the introduction of a Safety Training Program. We didn’t hear very much of it since that initiative, so I’m hoping that the Minister might be able to enlighten us as to where we’re at in terms of the rollout, budget dollars and what priority this will have in this fiscal year in terms of prioritizing safety and minimizing risk to employees.

The other thing that has come up in our discussions a little bit and at least overview is, I guess, our overtime policy. I know committee was a bit concerned regarding the overtime policy, and more particularly, that we did see a substantial growth in overtime in this fiscal budget, albeit a small number, but one which does beg the question what are our policies, have they been reviewed, what are the interdepartmental agreements in place for banked hours, those types of things. I think the committee is asking for that information only to ask that we have some consistencies as we’re going from department to department.

I know that we did have some questions and concerns regarding the service partnership agreements between the Department of Health and Social Services and, I believe, Finance because of the fact we are transferring a lot of duties with the medical travel. I understand in your opening comments the rationale for it, but I think it’s important that people understand why and whether or not all the financial aspects have been taken care of with that transfer.

Now, you might want to correct me if I’m wrong through the Minister here, but I am going through the employee survey, and I believe the last survey results that we have tabled to the public was in 2012. I have to comment only because that’s what I only have in front of me here, which I am using as a tool as we, I guess, get our palate wet in terms of what’s happening in the Department of HR.

The 2012 GNWT Employee Satisfaction and Engagement Survey, for the most part, is a good survey. I want to say that for the record. However, as we are all aware that there are opportunities here they call the priority areas, and a lot of the priority areas where our employees have told us, as a government, they would like to see improvement. I have yet to see a substantial document or positioning statement or, I guess, action plan, per se, that would address some of the lower scores that we received in that survey, and again, if there’s a new survey pending please advise the Members here of upcoming results possibly from 2013.

As I said, in no particular order here, and again maybe we can get some confirmation here, we know that the legislation pertaining to HR under the Safe Disclosure Policy is hopefully imminent. We know that committee members have spoken quite at length in terms of its support and the fact that there is a requirement for doing so.

There is equal argument for, I guess, the private sector, as well, to have something of equal value within the parameters of a safety act of that nature. Again, I would ask that maybe the Minister could comment as to where we are with the Safe Disclosure Policy and whether or not the private sector would be part of this whistleblowing protection that seems to be on the mind of many.

Other than that, I am going to have more specifics as we go into the details here, but again I wanted to reiterate some of the positive comments that we are seeing in here and maybe if we can get a little bit of an update to some of those inquiries not mentioned in the opening address and somewhat embedded in the pages of the main estimates here, that would be great if we could get some clarity on that. Thank you.