Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. As the Minister said, we go to great lengths when we do have an employee who we wish to accommodate and it’s worth noting that accommodations can range quite extensively. It can be everything from a temporary accommodation for an employee who has broken their leg and they’re in a cast and they need something for the duration
of time they’re in a cast, to something that’s quite a lot more substantive and it may indeed even be invisible to the eye, for example, addictions.
What we find, as well, is that we work to the point, as is outlined in our Duty to Accommodate Injury and Disability Policy, to the point of undue hardship and as an employer the size of the GNWT it’s not easy, we go to great lengths before we say we’ve reached undue hardship when it comes to accommodating one employee. So we’ve done things as extensive as looking at opportunities to be able to take work that we were contracting out to see if we could bundle that for employees to make it very workable for them.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, what we want to do is get the employee back to work, get them feeling like they are able to work to the extent that they are physically and mentally able to do, we want them back in the workforce, we want that degree of normalcy for them. We work very hard to find an option that’s going to work for them. If at the end of the day the options that we put forward for accommodation are things that the employee says no, I don’t want that, I don’t think that’s going to work for me – and again, we’re checking with their physician as appropriate, as well, and working with them very closely – if an employee says no, that’s not workable, we do work to exhaust every one of the options that we’ve put before them. If they say no, then we recognize that we’ve done as much as we can and we do look to the employee then to determine what they would like to do for the next steps. Thank you very much.
