Thank you, Madam Chair. My time is up.

I didn’t notice the clock. Next on the list, then, I have for general comments, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to welcome the Minister and the department here today. I’m going to start off by saying, I’m just going to quote a passage out of the opening comments here and it says that we are seeing an increase of $688,000, or 2.9 percent, versus last year. Now, just that number alone shows me, are we controlling expenditures? As we heard in the operational budget address, we want to keep our expenditures in line with revenues. Here is another classic example. I’m going to be putting every department on notice on this very concept. If we’re going to do blanket statements about that in the House, then we better support it with numbers.

It’s clear that we’re going 2.9 percent over and our revenue streams are only going up by 0.4 percent this year. If you look at the forecast for the next couple of years with our resource revenues and our resources in general, because of our funding formula, because of our population base not increasing, clearly this department is not in line with the expenditures relationship to revenue. I want to point that out. This is very obvious. If we’re going to continue to use language of “we want to do things in line,” then please, we have to justify that with the numbers. Clearly, this is not going in line with the statement.

Now, I am very pleased that we haven’t seen any more increases since the last time we looked at that, since last fall when we first did the first round of budget deliberations. So I’m pleased with the fact that we’re not seeing any future growth in expenditures since the fall of last year. But that being said, when I see blanket statements like that, it does beg to ask that question. Maybe the Minister may want to comment on that.

That being said, there are actually five areas I would like to cover. A lot of them will probably be captured in details. I just want to bring those five areas up today in a broader scope, if the Minister wants to comment on it. If I don’t hear the proper explanation or thoroughness, I will be bringing them back up in detail for more clarity.

Those five areas, in no particular order, except the last one, the most important, that I will leave for last. Now for the issue of vacancy management. This has been brought up many times in the House by many different Members for many different concerns. We even talked about that here today. What’s very puzzling is that we’re hearing we have to manually calculate some stuff, we’re creating tools and we’re building capacity. We’ve spent millions of dollars on PeopleSoft, millions of dollars. For me to hear we have to do a manual calculation for a simple ask begs the question what did we buy? What value did we get for the millions of

dollars we spent of taxpayers’ money to bring in what was stated and clearly brought to the House as being the epitome of software opportunities? What did we get if we have to manually calculate responses to Members?

I question the reporting tools of vacancy management. Again, as the Minister indicated, we only see this semi-annually, so twice a year. So what kind of transparency program can you offer Members? What transparency program can you offer the people of the Northwest Territories in the management of vacancy? The Department of HR is really the catch-all. It’s the funneling effect of all departments. It sets the tone for every department for vacancy management. So if our tools aren’t there or if our tools aren’t used properly, we are behind the eight ball on that issue. I really think I need some clarity on do we have the right program, do we have the right software and clearly is there more opportunity to provide transparency with that so we can answer those basic questions of what are our vacancies and all the statutes that go around them?

The second area I want to talk about is direct appointments and the policy in general about direct appointments and it’s not talked about in the general comments. To a certain degree, direct appointments are needed. I’m not saying direct appointments should be eliminated. I am saying direct appointments are needed in certain circumstances. In certain parts of our smallest communities direct appointments have value. I want to state that clearly. However, that policy is too broad of a concept to be used as a general panacea for all our government expenditures. When we’re looking at potentially 100 direct appointments per year – and I’m probably not far off with that number – that tells me we have a policy issue. When I read Jim Prentice coming on as Premier of Alberta and in his opening address saying we’re going to look at direct appointments in Alberta and put on a revitalization to lower them and get them in line so the people of Alberta see a transparent government. These are our brothers and sisters south of us who see it as a potential problem.

We, on the other hand, don’t see it at all. We see it as everyday business. I think this is an opportunity that this department, this Minister, has to deal with direct appointments and deal with them in a way that is more transparent. That they can bring more practicality and procedural fairness to our hiring policies so that we’re not shutting out people. How many people may leave the Northwest Territories knowing full well their position is going to be direct appointed? Why would they stay? Why would they? We’re trying to keep people in the Northwest Territories. So let’s think about the competition of jobs as much as possible. Yes, as I said in my earlier comment on this, sometimes it makes

sense, sometimes, but not all the time. That’s all I want to leave you with on that.

It was talked earlier about our Student and Youth Strategy. This is my third point. I’m pleased, I’m extremely pleased and I have to be honest and truthful when I see good stuff. This is some good stuff coming from the department. I have seen the recruiting fairs for our students. I’ve seen students feeling they’ve accomplished something. They have resumes in hand. They are speaking to different departments. They are leaving these fairs with smiles on their faces and they are feeling optimistic when they return back to school to finish their second term. I just saw that during the Christmas break. So, congratulations. You guys hit a home run with that and I encourage you to foster a better environment moving forward by using some of those principles that I saw with the recruiting program.

However, Madam Chair, the issue of whether we are meeting all the needs of all students, I don’t think we are. I think there are lots of students we could be hiring. But because we have a quota – we’re not printing money here, we have to be very careful of the money we spend – how many do we turn away? I think there are opportunities to look at and I’ve said this before. We can look at creations of 0.5 positions, half-time positions within our government, job sharing positions with our students and those students can go back and find jobs within the private workforce and help our private industry. Private industry is saying yes, I like that. So let’s facilitate that. Like I said, talk is cheap, whiskey costs money. We can do this if we put our minds together.

The other thing on my list is overtime policy review and reporting. This has been brought up many, many times about our policies and the standardization of our policies on overtime. The number one controllable expense in business is wage dollars. The number one expense in this government is wage dollars. We don’t talk about that because it’s a taboo subject. I’m not talking about reducing positions; I’m talking about right-sizing our workforce. It’s about looking at standardization over time, looking at how we bank and looking at how we do our payouts. Clearly, we need some direction there. I’d like to get the Minister to talk about it.

Finally, Madam Chair, as I see the clock dwindling here, the number one issue, bar none, is our Occupational Health and Safety Program, or should I say the lack thereof. I have spent a lot of time in this House talking about our safety culture or the lack of a safety culture in the Northwest Territories for our government services. The fact remains that there is no standardization out there. We have no clear, definitive program of a safety culture and clearly this has been backed up by the courts. The

courts have said, “GNWT, wake up.” How many more guilty pleas and cases are we going to have to undertake and paying fines before this government wakes up and says we have to do something? Just having an active or valid WSCC certificate is by no way, shape or form a safety program. It just means you’ve paid your fees. I want to look at that as an opportunity within the boundaries of this department for this next fiscal year. I haven’t seen it thus far and I think there’s huge opportunity.

We have an opportunity to improve upon our safety culture. I’m hoping that it’s not the courts that will decide that in due process. I’m hoping that all department officials listening today, all department officials are going to be going back and reading the transcripts today, hear me. The day of reckoning is coming and it’s coming very close, Madam Chair, that senior people within our government will be held liable and accountable for wrongful issues involving safety and I don’t want to see that happen. I want to see some commitment moving forward.

Madam Chair, those are my five areas of general comments. Thank you.

Thank you, Member Dolynny. Minister Beaulieu.

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.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Deputy Minister Desjardins.

Thank you, Ms. Desjardins. General comments. Next I have Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Madam

Chair. I guess most of my colleagues have covered a lot of the issues we’re talking about, so I’m going to focus in on one issue. I think Mr. Dolynny skated around the issue I have. I want to talk about students and the vacancies that we have, and I’m talking about students that are getting a post-secondary education, whether it’s in the Northwest Territories, whether it’s in southern Canada.

Have we worked out the ability to contact students and tell them about job postings that are in the Northwest Territories for them to take advantage of? Have we straightened out that issue with student financial assistance and be able to contact students directly on how we can give them the information; these are job postings, these are potential jobs that we have in the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam

Chair. We know that in the past it has been difficult for officials, or Ministers for that matter, to go down and meet with students because there is no pre-consent from the students in their privacy. We can’t just come into a community, phone the students up and invite them to meet with us and so on.

We are actually working with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment in predetermining from the students to indicate that they have no issue with officials or politicians like ourselves coming down and meeting with students, and that’s something we think is going to have some merit and will bear fruit.

When we attended NWT Days, three of us had an opportunity to meet with eight students down in Ottawa: five students from Yellowknife, one from Hay River, one from Fort Providence and one from Simpson. They were very excited. The students had an opportunity to speak to us. I think that each of those students had an opportunity to speak to Ministers Lafferty and Miltenberger, and I spoke to each of the students as well. They of course want to return, come to work for us during the summer and ultimately come to work in the Territories. Each of them have indicated to me what their field of studies has been and where they would like to work and I think they were very pleased that we had talked to them, took them out for breakfast and an opportunity to advise them that perhaps they could return to a full-time job and then for sure a summer job this coming summer.

I’m sorry about that. I would like to ask if the deputy minister could add something to my comments as well.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Ms. Desjardins.

Thank you, Ms. Desjardins. Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My next question, I guess, is more specific to that linking in that I would like to see us implementing a mentoring program. I know from my personal experience when I was doing a post-secondary degree I had an opportunity to get on a mentorship program, a training program where in my third year, once I was done my third year I got a position with the GNWT, so in my fourth year, when I was down in Lethbridge, I didn’t even bother looking for a job anywhere else. I knew I was committed to the Northwest Territories, coming back.

Are we working on programs, I see HR is the link for this for all of the departments, is there a way to mentor or offer these students positions before they are done their degree, before they have been in their last year of university and before they are being recruited by the big shell companies before all these other companies in the South that are

looking for employees, skilled educated employees? We should be doing the same thing.

Obviously, all that communication we have just been talking about I think would be very important for us to link that and try to get them in before, get them into our government realm before they start looking for a job. It gives them the confidence, gives them the direction that they know they are going to come back. I think it goes hand in hand with our goal of bringing 2,000 people to the Northwest Territories. If you already have those people committed to a job, and we have a large vacancy so I can’t see why we are not doing more of this to mentor, to train, to training positions. Some of these people are very, very highly skilled, so I wouldn’t see them just coming in as juniors. Some of them could be coming in to middle management, depending on their degrees, or skilled labour, a skilled workforce. Is there anything that the GNWT is working on in that direction?

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Ms. Desjardins.

Thank you, Ms. Desjardins. Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m just wondering what it would take for the Department of HR to – and again I see HR as the lynchpin for all the departments – to implement this and say this is the type of mentoring program that we want all the departments to look at when they are hiring positions. If you have a large vacancy to use, even engineers in transportation, for example, there are all kinds of different examples and we hear them all the time, we talk about it to students wherever we go, they are talking about deciding whether they are going to go back north or taking a job in the South. If that person already has a job in their third year before they are done their schooling and they already know they are committed to come to the North and they are from the North, they understand the realm and the considerations that are involved, but they already know they are coming back, so they are not job searching in the South. They already have a commitment. They are comfortable. If we can give them some sort of assistance from their job position, it is something that we need to implement, I think. To use that to leverage students to come back, it is going to basically give them the comfort, give us the comfort

that we have Northerners, that we have people from the North.

When they come back here, they tend to stay here. We are not hiring somebody from the South that has to learn what the Northwest Territories is about, be concerned about the weather, or be concerned about the communities they are coming into. Most of these Northerners will know that. They will understand where they are going to if they are going to one of the smaller communities or if they are coming into Yellowknife or Hay River. They know exactly where they are going. They understand the whole thing, so this mentor program is something I strongly feel is a good avenue for us to make our students come back to the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess I am going to speak a bit about what we are doing to attract summer students; however, I think we will stay with the idea that the Member is referring to a mentoring program.

We think there is merit in such an idea. Again, it is something that once we have gone through the process of retaining the student or recruiting the student to the GNWT, then it would be the responsibility of each department to determine what type of mentoring that the student would go through, what type of mentoring that student would need in order to succeed in the job that they are being targeted into. That is something that the departments can look at.

I am going to have the deputy minister add a bit to that on the mentoring. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Ms. Desjardins.

Thank you, Ms. Desjardins. Any further general comments on the Department of Human Resources.