Thank you, Mr. Chairman. After the last response from Ms. Bassi-Kellett, actually she touched on almost everything that I was thinking about talking about. Hmmm, I don’t have any general comments anymore.
I wasn’t aware of some of the work that she’s referred to that was actually going on in the department. As an MLA, I guess on the front lines of dealing with constituents, you do get a lot of concerns raised by people who think that the system doesn’t work for them in terms of getting into the public service. You get concerns from people who are priority 1 hires, who think that the Affirmative Action Policy did not serve their interests in getting hired for a job. You hear concerns from indigenous non-Aboriginal Northerners who feel like the hiring policies didn’t serve their interests. It seems like what we hear, it sounds like kind of everybody is unhappy.
I think what we need to do is get really innovative, really creative and find ways to match the people who want to work in the public service to the jobs. Some of the things, like I said that Ms. Bassi-Kellett just referred to, like internships, I think those are amazing. If it makes them more effective to extend them from one year to two years, then let’s do that. You know, job shadowing. I’m really interested in the Student and Youth. You know, some of the positions – we joked the other day in committee – that have been vacant in the government, we could have put somebody through university now to fill those positions. But it takes that contact, perhaps even at the high school level, in order to create the awareness of the kinds of careers that are available in the public and then help guide people through
the education process so they can ultimately end up where they want to be in a career in the public service at the end of their education. I think that getting into the high schools is a really good idea.
The leadership development, the management services, all of these things are what I classify as creative, innovative programs, ideas, initiatives that serve our purposes. We do have a lot of vacancies and it seems like there are people out there who would like to work, but I think it’s a multi-pronged approach in the sense that I do think we need new people to come to the Northwest Territories. I do think we need to find ways to… It’s a combination of everything. We need to find ways to get our own people from the Northwest Territories involved, as well, and, at the same time, with the backdrop of the representative workforce always as our goal.
I’m encouraged by what I hear. I hope it goes well. I don’t know what to tell people when they say, you know, I’ve gone out, I’ve gone to university, I’ve got an education but I can’t get a job with the government. I don’t know what to say to them. It’s almost like you need an ombudsman or something for those kinds of things, because it’s really difficult.
I know, having been in Cabinet, it’s very difficult for Ministers to get directly involved in personnel issues. A lot of people don’t know that. They think you can go to the Minister and the Minister can just, you know, drill down into wherever the problem is and fix it. No, that’s not the way it goes. Even as MLAs, our hands are kind of tied because we don’t have the inside knowledge or the detailed knowledge of how to advise these people sometimes. Other MLAs must find that, too, that you do have constituents come to you and they say, oh, I’ve been blacklisted, or I can’t get an interview, and they tell you these things and it really is sad, but it’s very hard to ever clearly define these things because a lot of things are wrapped around personnel and interviews and those processes are confidential. Some of the positions are unionized and there’s union involvement in them, as well, so it is kind of a complex field. HR in general is a complex field, especially nowadays, and I think it continues to get more complex.
Let me draw the comparison to what we have in the Department of Health and Social Services with the system navigator where we have issues with medical travel and different issues, and we can actually refer those to somebody. There’s nothing wrong with going to the Minister’s office, but ultimately, at the end of the day, we do know that the Minister, you know… I mean, there’s a point where Cabinet can get involved and there can be direct appointments, and there are policies at a politician’s disposal to deal with things like that, but ultimately, it’s difficult. I don’t know. This is just a suggestion to throw out there.
If there was some way that we could refer those kinds of concerns to a single desk somewhere where people could tell their story, I guess, because you do hear of situations, and it’s impossible to be everywhere and on top of every hiring event. It’s very, very difficult for the department to do that, and sometimes people’s own agendas do probably come in to play. I mean, let’s just say everybody’s human. Maybe there are incidents where that does happen, but it is frustrating when we, as MLAs, hear of those cases and feel kind of like that our hands are tied because we don’t really have access to, really, the detail or what the issue is.
I’ll just leave it there. Those are my general comments, but just to underscore that we need to be creative. I guess, when I started off in this government, nepotism was a horrible word. You know, hiring friends and family, that was awful, but it is a small territory. I used the example in committee one day of a private company that I know of who were struggling with labour market challenges, and they looked at the children of their existing employees and said why don’t we have a loyalty program and why don’t we target that critical mass of people and why don’t we have a loyalty hiring policy so that the children of our employees can work for our company too? Now, I know you can’t do that in the government, but I’m just saying that there are ways to get creative about hiring Northerners and networking and people who know people who are qualified to do these jobs, and to get that population up where the Minister of Finance wants it and increase it by 2,000 people. We’ve got lots of challenges ahead of us, but I’ll just leave it at that. Thank you. Those are my general comments.