Thank you, Madam Chair. So there are four assistant deputy ministers between ENR and Lands at this time. There is one new assistant deputy minister position for operations that will be a regional position that is -- it is envisioned as an Indigenous pathing position to support Indigenous people to getting into senior management in the new department. So that's the new assistant deputy minister position that we're looking at.
With respect to the positions -- the change in positions that folks are seeing, there was a sunset of eight positions related to section 11 agreement and the nature fund agreement. And there was forced growth for ten new positions, all of them regional related to forest fire.
So as folks are aware, our fire season went until October this year, which is far longer than normal, and we're seeing more fires in some of the areas of the Northwest Territories than we've ever seen before. So we were able to access forced growth funding as a department to support firefighting personnel in several communities, a wildfire training position in Fort Smith, and a fire technician position in Lutselk'e. And all of those positions are regional positions. That's why you're seeing the difference in positions.
With respect to those duplicate positions, those will be addressed through the optimization process that we're dealing with, and we will make -- as I mentioned, we're expecting that there will be less than ten folks that are affected that are unionized employees. So that will be dealt with through the optimization phase that we're currently working towards. Thank you, Madam Chair.