Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to speak on a couple of these items brought forward by the Member, then I’m going to ask the deputy to speak on some specific details. I will ask that she speak specific details on the Youth and Student Strategy and also more elaboration on the career fair.
We do attend other career fairs within the territory, but they are hosted by others. The Department of Education will host career fairs and often when those career fairs are occurring, then Human Resources would come in and piggyback onto their career fair and we would have people there from Human Resources. We’ve attended one in Inuvik and the next one is in Hay River that Education is putting on. We will be attending that as well.
The Member speaks about the group of kids that are in high school and looking at what they wish to do for their careers. I guess just overall the department wants to achieve the same type of things that the Member speaks of, that we’re interested in having Aboriginal people in senior management positions as well.
We have the Aboriginal Management Development Program which was known for the last couple of years as the Superintendent/Associate Director Program. Now we’re looking at the Aboriginal Management Development Program at the management level, so management level, director level, superintendent level. I would say that at some point moving forward, we would probably look at some development at the ADM level and even the DM level in the future.
So this is something that, as Minister, I will be pursuing and making sure that we stay on task to be able to bring Aboriginal senior managers into the fold.
In the Sahtu we have decent numbers for the positions in these communities. The GNWT has about 280 positions in the Sahtu, recognizing that 60 of them are vacant, not 60 of those ones but of the 280 filled positions and 60 vacant positions, about half of those, so about 30 of those positions we are recruiting for. About 15 of those positions, we will be activating. We consider them positions that are inactive and we will look at deleting those from the books so it doesn’t look like there’s a tremendous amount of vacancies sitting there.
In the Sahtu, the numbers look really good. We are really encouraged by the fact that when we fill the positions… Although it’s very difficult. We can fill these positions and then there will be people
leaving, leaving the various departments in the Sahtu as they are right across the territory. This is a number that we work with but we are constantly in the mode of trying to fill positions as a department as we work with the other departments.
With that, Mr. Chairman, with your indulgence, I’d like to ask if the deputy minister could provide a little more detail to the Member.