We’re going to continue to talk about our own employees negotiating very competitive wage packages where some of our teachers, for example, are some of the best paid in the country. We are going to be talking in an Energy Charrette about the need to look at the issue of type of generation, and we’re going to indicate as a government that we’re prepared to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with the generation issues that have a direct effect and impact on the cost of living tied to energy requirements that the Territorial Power Support Program we currently have does not benefit businesses, so the businesses in the small communities bear the full cost of power generation, which can be an extremely onerous burden.
We started our work on increasing the population by 2,000 people over the next five years. That work is well along the way. So, we have a whole host of things that we’re doing to address these issues.
I point out that we still have one of the best quality of life in the territory and some of the best social programs, best education programs, best support for seniors programs anywhere in the country, so we have a lot of attributes.
There are a lot of internal things we need to do, and I touched on those yesterday, in terms of being able to go south for those hard-to-fill positions and give our staff the capacity to hire while they’re down south on the spot. We’re going to do things with industry to do job fairs and those types of things collectively down south as we both go ahead to try to address the issues that face us.
We have hundreds of job vacancies that we’re trying to do a better job at. We’re investing $22 million over three years to put housing into the small communities, market housing, so that these hard-to-fill positions are not going to be not filled because there’s not proper housing. We’re onto phase three of decentralization to get positions out into the communities, out of the centre, tied to devolution, tied to our interest to make sure that we spread the government presence as broadly as we can across the Territories.
So there’s a whole host of things that we’re doing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.