Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The career fair that we had in Ottawa is one method for the GNWT to attract individuals to come to work in the Northwest Territories. As a government, our approach is holistic when we try to also bring in some population, bring some people in and we have a goal of increasing our population in the territory, but one of the principle reasons for going to Ottawa would be to look at some of the very difficult to fill positions. Also, attracting some Northerners to come back to the territory.

When we were down there, we had contact with over 600 people. Some of them are Northerners that are working down there that would like to come back to work in the territory. In addition to the open houses, we want to gauge the success of that, but we’re not obligated to just hire people from the South. What we’re doing is we’re trying to spread out the methods in which we use to try to fill the public service positions in the GNWT. We have the open houses that we’re going to continue to use to communicate to individuals in the regional centres, in the communities and so on. We have completed one open house – I personally have not seen the results of that open house – and we’re continuing to run open houses into May in the various centres, including a couple of open houses here.

We want to have some of the strategies, Workforce Planning Strategy, which has the regional recruitment and the Aboriginal Management Development Program in our overall Workforce Planning Strategy, so we are looking everywhere to try to keep the vacancy rate down as low possible across the territory.

Going to Ottawa is not something that we would do in replacement of trying to hire Northerners. Our priority is to still hire Northerners. Our priority is still to apply the Affirmative Action Policy when they come to apply for jobs with the various departments across our government. Human Resources does ensure that the Affirmative Action Policy is used on all hiring actions. So if a department has a job out and there’s a priority 1 candidate that is qualified for that job, they would receive their interviews first to try to get our affirmative action numbers up as high as possible. Thank you.