Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today, like some of my colleagues, I want to address something mentioned in the Finance Minister’s budget address, and that’s the government’s plan to attract and retain 2,000 new residents to and in the NWT over the next five years.

Youth are a very important segment of our NWT society. I hear that said all the time in this Assembly. When we’re looking for skilled workers

for the GNWT, who better to serve our residents than those who have grown up here and know the issues and the culture?

The GNWT has had varying degrees of success in attracting and retaining our youth to the public service. There are some wonderful successes and I’m looking at many of them here in the House. Over half of the Members of this Assembly are homegrown. But there have also been significant losses as our bright and talented youth are denied in the North, take up positions in the South and then are lost to the NWT.

The government has to review the practices we’ve used over the years, look back to see what particular strategies have been successful in the past and that we no longer use. In years past the GNWT had liaison workers on several university campuses, the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan, to mention two. Those people were there to specifically look after NWT students. It helped keep them in school, keep them in touch with family and, yes, keep them in touch with jobs at home while they were away from home.

One of the biggest reasons our young people return to live and work in the NWT is because family is here. We need to ensure that the connection to family is maintained while they’re away at school.

We have considerable data about students available to us through Education, Culture and Employment through the SFA system. SFA currently tracks students in terms of loans, when they’re due, when they’re in arrears and so on. Surely we can also track them for employment purposes. We can know their field of study, when they will be finished their schooling, and match them to job vacancies in the GNWT public service at graduation.

Creating mentoring relationships has proven to be another effective strategy for supporting new young staff in a variety of workplace settings. It currently exists in both nursing and teaching and it allows us to hire our smart, knowledgeable but inexperienced young people and mentor them into a position that called for experience when it was vacant.

Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted