Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to use today’s occasion to return to the northern jobs issue that I, as well as many of my good colleagues, have been raising over the past several days.

We all know very well that we pass compensation dollars here every single year and in every single budget, and we certainly expected that money to be used for the reason it’s passed. It’s difficult for me to go back to the taxpayer to say the government

needs more money and they’re not spending it the way we’ve appropriated it. They look and ask what are we really doing here.

Since I’ve been discussing this issue – and I, as well, extend credit to my colleagues here on this side of the House – I’ve been receiving calls and e-mails from across the Northwest Territories and even in small communities, asking where are those jobs as promised. How can the government stand up and say we have all these jobs that are sitting empty? They’ll fill them with casuals for short term, but why aren’t we employing them properly like we really should? How many vacancies are truly on the books in these small communities where every single job makes a huge difference?

I can’t tell you or anyone in this room who doesn’t already know how important a job is, because those jobs feed families, they buy Christmas presents, they even pay mortgages and rents in many cases.

As Members, we know very well human resource dollars were intended for human resources dollars, not to be used as O and M or capital. But as we all know, these job dollars sometimes find their way to cover O and M requirements and sometimes that’s millions and millions of dollars. Sometimes the human resource dollars aren’t being used and applied properly and they’re used as casual dollars instead of hiring people as we originally intended. Or even worse, if you have a small community maintainer position and you can’t fill it, why aren’t we using it as a transition work development type of opportunity? But, no, we’d rather leave it empty and use that money for other things.

Everything I’m talking about is things like human resources that aren’t properly spent, in my view and certainly the view of many others. If we just take simple facts, the rolling vacancy of the Government of the Northwest Territories is somewhere between 16 and 17 percent and that’s about $15 million. That’s a rolling vacancy.

Everything I’m talking about simply adds to this: the government deputy ministers and Ministers want the flexibility to do what they want to meet their objectives. They call this micromanagement; the public calls it accountability.