Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, under the current policy, the affirmative action policy, there is still this ranking system that goes on, what everyone knows as the P1s, P2s, but within that you have P1A, P1B, and all these different sorts of ranking depending upon the position, depending upon who's in the position. So there's already complexity within there that categorizes people under different ways depending on the job and then creates this priority listing. Madam Speaker, what we're actually doing now is separating that out so that it is very clear that first there is the priority on the Indigenous employment policy that would take preference for the Indigenous Canadians in the Northwest Territories, within the boundaries of the Northwest Territories, while not losing the fact that we -- the Northerners, the long Northerners are also arguably subject to wanting to ensure that we continue to have them prioritized for the public service. But within that, Madam Speaker, there are other equity groups in Canada that we would like to see as members of the public service. There's not a flood of people coming to the Northwest Territories. If there were, I think that would be a good problem to have quite frankly, but there's not. The employment equity policy operates as a secondary policy to the Indigenous employment policy, and it matches numbers. So instead of just this blanket ranking, we're now going to say if there's positions, and we know that our labour market has ten people available and we have positions available, we can start to fill up our positions with the folks that we know are here. The Indigenous employment policy, again, comes first. The other one comes second. We're matching targets numbers now, not just ranking people. So this is actually a much more targeted way of going about it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Caroline Wawzonek on Question 1373-19(2): Affirmative Action
In the Legislative Assembly on February 15th, 2023. See this statement in context.
Question 1373-19(2): Affirmative Action
Oral Questions
February 15th, 2023
Page 5315
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