Thank you, Madam Chair. The $688,000 increase is increases and decreases that appear in our business plan. The majority of that increase is the Collective Agreement increase which is $689,000. Also this year, we are going into the next contract so we have to bring some people in to negotiate the next contract and we budgeted $434,000 bringing people in for the contract.
PeopleSoft maintenance and support, we’ve budgeted $21,000. So those are increases of $1.1 million.
We also bring in French language communication services, as I indicated in my opening comments. We also are requesting more money on devolution items, so an additional $170,000. However, we are transferring $268,000 to Finance and we have some other adjustments, a couple of reductions for about $358,000.
In reality, moving this money around, the majority, I guess all of the increase could go to collective bargaining increases, so that’s something that is negotiated. It’s year four of that agreement, plus, like I indicated, another big chunk of the increase is that we need some legal representation as we move into the next round of negotiations.
Vacancy management is an interesting term. We try to recruit and retain the public service as much as possible. We support the departments to recruit and retain individuals. We do actively work with the vacancy rate in the government. As the Member can see, I indicated in one of my other responses
that it has dropped by over 200 people from the last vacancy report until this.
PeopleSoft is a snapshot report that is outdated the day after the report is printed. We have a lot of moving parts. There are 5,000-some-odd public servants in the system, so the next day if somebody retires or resigns or gets hired, it’s outdated the very next day. So what we do is PeopleSoft gives us a snapshot – it is expensive – twice a year and that’s what we pay to do. So it does what it intends to do. It gives us numbers that we work with.
Each department is responsible to look at their vacancy rates and work with what they have, and that’s, to me, the management of vacancies, using that term as a responsibility that lies from department to department.
Direct appointments, again, is a Cabinet policy. We are different than the jurisdiction the Member refers to. We have an Aboriginal population of about half of the people in the Northwest Territories. We have an affirmative action. We have a goal to have a representative population in the public service, so our public service should be representative of the population, and it’s not. We use direct appointments for various reasons and we consider it to be a good tool.
So far from January 1st to December 31 2014, there
was – when you talk about the public service actions, we’re talking about promotions, hires, transfer assignments and so on – about 1,950 people moving around in the public service. Many of them are new hires. We had 246 direct appointments during that time. So, when we talk about the affirmative action it has been one of our better to tools to attract affirmative action candidates to the government. Forty-eight percent of those direct appointments were people that had affirmative action status.
The youth and student point that the Member makes about how many actual students we are turning away, the fact is we get about 600-and-something applicants each year and we are hiring about 300 students. The idea of hiring some on six hours, four hours, and then allowing individual students to go out and make the rest of their income in the private industry is something that has a lot of merit. We would have to again discuss that department by department. Departments are responsible for hiring summer students. The departments are responsible for using that bit of vacancy rate that they have in their own departments and that allows them to free up the money in order to hire students. So the department comes and says, well, instead of hiring 20 students this year, we’re going to hire 40 on a half-time basis and the students will have to go out and find jobs in the private industry to supplement their incomes for the summer so they have money to go back to school with, and we’re okay with that. Any of those
types of innovative things that the departments wish to do with student hires are something that goes department by department. I could discuss that possibility with the departments that I’m responsible for. We think it’s a good idea and has lots of merit there in the comments.
On the occupational health and safety, I would like to have the deputy minister just touch on that again. More of a departmental issue, but I’ll have the deputy respond to that, Madam Chair.