Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I am pleased with the Human Resources department strategy on striving for a representative workforce and ensuring that we follow our Aboriginal… I’m sorry, my notes are a bit mixed up here, but the Affirmative Action Policy is what I wanted to address here.

Our regional education authorities have no involvement or request no training from Human Resources for their hiring committees. This is concerning because I have heard of several cases in the past few years where our Northerners and our Aboriginals who have become teachers are often overlooked for applying for teaching jobs in their home communities.

I did some quick research into the stats of how many Aboriginals and Northerners work in our education system. On a whole, it is about 45 percent. However, when we look at the professionals, when we look at the teachers, we have only about 26 percent that are Aboriginals and/or Northerners. This falls short of our affirmative action and representative workforce goals.

I should qualify that existing teachers mostly become part of our communities and become great Northerners. My concern is that going forward we must involve and allow the Human Resources department to work with our regional education authorities so that our Northerners and Aboriginal teachers are not overlooked and given a chance to truly contribute and teach and give back to our Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.