Madam Speaker, I rise today, along with my colleagues, to speak about the Affirmative Action Policy in the Northwest Territories. My focus in this Member's statement is to talk about the many gaps that exist within the policy. The Government of the Northwest Territories created the Affirmative Action Policy to hire under-represented groups of people in the public service. To ensure that the government is representative of the population it serves, the designated groups are Indigenous Aboriginal Persons (P1); Indigenous Non-Aboriginal Persons (P2); Resident Disabled Persons (P3); and Resident Women (P4).
Madam Speaker, while the Affirmative Action Policy has existed in the NWT since March of 1989, it remains an imperfect policy. There are gaps in this policy which people have been falling through since it was created. The gaps I'm referring to, however, are generally harder to measure and can be susceptible to manipulation through statistics, which hides many of the problems.
The main problem with the Affirmative Action Policy is not the policy itself, but rather the people who are doing the hiring. Everyone in the North knows that there is a huge issue of nepotism; of people hiring their friends or their managers' friends or relatives; or people tailoring job descriptions to match a particular person's resume; or people who put the qualifications for certain jobs very high because they assume and Indigenous person could not meet those qualifications, and so on. The problem with affirmative action is that it is so easy for interviewers to find weaknesses in applicants, which is then used to rationalize to screen out certain applicants from job competitions. More often than not, Madam Speaker, it is the Indigenous candidates who get screened out the earliest and in a greater degree than non-Indigenous candidates. Madam Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted