Bob McLeod

For the purposes of this budget it has been removed.

My understanding is that there were some competitions that were cancelled as a result of that.

Mr. Chair, we know how many positions we have in the government. The expectation and the requirement is that all departments have to come in within budget, so it’s not costing the government incrementally any more than they’ve already budgeted for.

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to announce that the Government of the Northwest Territories and the Northwest Territories Teachers’ Association have reached a tentative four-year collective agreement.

The negotiations began in April 2008 and were concluded last week. The meetings were positive, and both parties are pleased with the agreement.

This agreement makes a number of important changes that assist us in improving overall administration. Ratification of the tentative agreement is recommended, and the process will be concluded by June 16, 2008.

Mr. Chairman, as I recall, the Hackett Report — and I’d have to look at it in more detail — when comparing to other organizations…. I think they were comparing it to similar-sized organizations in the United States, or larger centres that readily have access to fully trained, fully certified human resource professionals and, also, have lighter workloads and variety of job requirements than we have here in the Northwest Territories.

Certainly, that would be an area we would aspire to. I think that if the infrastructure in the Northwest Territories — or the technology — improved so that we could...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It’s a competency position. It’s been vacant for some time, and that’s probably why you couldn’t find it in the phonebook. It’s a position that’s been eliminated. We still have the remaining organization design officer who will continue this work. I think that developing proper competencies is something that is very important to make sure jobs are classified properly and evaluated properly. It makes a significant difference in our ability to hire and staff positions so we have the right competencies.

Mr. Chair, I think it’s in the neighbourhood of 500 staffing actions.

I guess it all boils down to how much detail the Members want to get into. Generally, the approach that has been taken is we let the managers manage. The expectation is that they come in within budget, and they manage on that basis. To micromanage every department for every single position would be excessive, but certainly what the Member is talking about is essentially a budgeting issue. If that’s the direction the Members want to go, then certainly we would communicate that back to the Financial Management Board, or the Minister responsible for that area, and they could approach it on that...

There are guidelines, but they’re generally more along the lines of first-, second-, third-level grievances. The first level should be handled right at the local workplace: sort it out there, and if it can’t be resolved there, it gets picked up. I think if we’re going to have timelines, it should be based on the realistic opportunity to reduce the number of grievances. If we have 250 outstanding grievances and they can only resolve them through arbitration, we only have so many arbitration officers. The union has agreed to set aside one week of every month up until the end of 2009 to deal with...

Sorry, Mr. Chair. This is something we try to deal with on a regular basis. For administrative ease — and dealing with some of the ins and outs of staffing and people moving and people going on transfer assignments — it’s a lot easier, at times, to create positions. Generally, as a department, we work with all of the departments to try to clean that up on an annual basis, so we go through and eliminate these vacant positions that are just on the books. They’re not really doing anything, they’re not costing us anything; it just makes it a lot cleaner, administratively, to remove them from the...