Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. O'Reilly.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate the explanation. I'm all for efficiency, but I don’t want that at the expense of fairness. It's my understanding is that the grounds and who can actually file an appeal are very, very limited which I think can lead to issues of credibility of our hiring process. So what is the department doing in terms of the fairness of staffing appeals to ensure that we can maintain credibility and confidence in our staffing processes? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, O'Reilly. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the parties who have appeal rights include any person eligible for priority consideration under the Affirmative Action Policy and any current GNWT employee. There are some scenarios where appointments to positions may not be appealed under regulations and those are clearly outlined within the policy and regulations. That's a person with a staffing priority status under the Staff Retention Policy, any position considered an executive position as determined by the job evaluation system, and teacher and/or principal jobs. With respect to fairness, I mean we want to be fair, we want to be open. Anybody can apply on jobs, but there are some limitations on who can appeal. And I mean we'll certainly continue to look at this to make sure that it's fair and reasonable, and I'd certainly like any insight the Member might have, but at this time, I mean we weren't going to do any additional review of the appeal process given that a review was done in the last Assembly and came into force in July 2015.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. O'Reilly.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll take the Minister up on his offer and put together some thoughts on this and pass those back to him because I think there are ways that we could ensure that we can maintain confidence in our staffing process by ensuring that we have a fair appeal process. So thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the Minister for being so open and transparent.

Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. Mr. Minister.

I'm looking forward to that conversation, but in light of that conversation I will point out that most of the employers throughout Canada, in fact many places throughout the world, don’t have appeal rights at all. This is something that we felt was appropriate given things like our Affirmative Action Policy and our desire to work with Northerners to employ Northerners. Most employers don’t have an appeal mechanism at all for job competitions and we have I think in many ways gone quite a distance to work with residents of the Northwest Territories. We’re always looking for ways to improve obviously and I look forward to that conversation.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. O'Reilly. Mr. Thompson?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thought Mr. Beaulieu was ahead of me. So we're on page 218, correct? I just want to make sure because yesterday I was a couple pages ahead sometimes. So in regards to contract services, I see a huge increase from $8,000 to $350,000. Can the Minister explain why there's this huge jump and discrepancy in money since it was $8,000 last year? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chair, there are three positions being eliminated within the Department of Human Resources, all of them were vacant, and they are a result of the reduction. As a result of eliminating some of these positions, especially the area around strategic human resources, we've had to do some reorganization within the department. So the re-allocation of the marketing and communication budget from the strategic human resources section, which was about $212,000, as well as some internal re-allocation of budget from purchase services to better align us with historical expenditures in this area have resulted in that change. That’s a matter of taking out of the strategic human resources section, put it here because those positions have been eliminated and some adjustments based on historical expenditures.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So if I get this correct, we lost three positions, now we're re-allocating money here, and are these contract services doing the work of these three positions or is it other contracts that are going to be done? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Mr. Thompson. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. No, I guess I didn't explain it clearly. The positions have been eliminated, that's part of our reduction exercise, but some of the programs and services they're delivering continue to exist, but because those positions don’t exist and that section has been changed, those services are now going to be delivered in a different area. They're now going to be delivered in management and recruitment services. The dollars that are coming out of the $212,000 are part of the marketing and communications budget, not the staff salary budget but the services or the programs they provided.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In regards to fees and payments, it's dropped by $19,000. You know, it was up by 18 and then it's down by 19, is there a rationale for this?

Thank you, Mr. Thompson. Mr. Minister?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, this is going to sound like a really repetitive answer, but in this particular area we really dug deep into the department trying to figure out what we're actually spending, and compare it to what our budgets were, and realign our budgets with actual expenditures rather than historic budgets. And this is one of the areas that, you know, we felt we needed to align in order to capture the fact that some of the fees and payments that we're making out there with respect to some of our software, our human resource-specific software, have escalated and changed over time.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Thompson?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So this purchased services the reduction to 135, is this actual historical or is this a reduction in services? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Thompson. Mr. Minister.

Sorry, I'm a little confused. I thought we were talking about the fees and payment line. Which line are we talking about?