The first year has been a planning year and we’ve been working with industry and we are looking at changes to the procedures. For example, in Human Resources, where we want to be able to go south to job fairs or recruiting, that we’re going to empower the folks that go down there to look at the resumes and do interviews. If the people meet the criteria, then a conditional job offer can be made pending the checking of references. That’s as opposed to the current process where we have to come back and months go by and people wander away. That’s one thing.
We are expecting and the Minister of ECE will be standing up in the House here in the very near future about good news issues where it pertains to the Nominee Program, the expedited process, the number of spaces we are going to have as a government, the ability to really ramp up our efforts in that area that will see a significant influx to the Northwest Territories. We are working with ITI on the work that they do, as well, with Make Your Mark and the other programs they have.
As a government we’ve made a decision that when we go south, now that we’ve sorted out education access to the names of the students in the various communities, want to start budgeting in our travel time to sit down with students in the communities we go to, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, you name it, to take them out and meet with them and do the recruiting that we talk about to ensure we don’t get superseded or bypassed by industry or other recruiters because we don’t make that effort. In fact, when we were down in Ottawa just recently, I and Minister Lafferty and Mr. Beaulieu were at breakfast with about eight or 10 of the students from Ottawa. We talked with them and the good news was that every one of the folks that came to breakfast indicated that they are definitely coming back to the North, but they really appreciated that effort, and that effort will pay dividends.
So, those that scoff or those that say you’ve had a year, you should have 500 people here already, sometimes ready, fire, aim is not the process to take. We want to get our aim clear first, before we pull the trigger, and that’s what we’ve done in this first year. Thank you.