Tom Beaulieu

Public Works and Services will be involved in organizing a construction workshop here in Yellowknife that’s an annual thing. That will be occurring sometime in April. What we will be doing as one of the topics will be discussing the energy efficiency act. Actually, sorry, I believe that’s in the middle of this month is when the date of that workshop will be occurring.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That money has been removed, but it didn’t impact directorate. This was a whole section on pay and benefits that was in Human Resources that moved to Finance, and all the people that were in the management and the whole group from there moved over but it didn’t impact on the directorate specifically.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We would be able to provide that in writing if the committee wished for us to provide that information in writing. We are also looking at creating a field in this report so that… Right now, this concentrates mostly on the vacancy rate. We’re working on creating a field in this report that would indicate overall which the candidates were, either a priority 1, 2 or 3. Just for more clarification, I would like to ask the deputy minister to add to that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As far as an actual retention strategy, I could maybe have the deputy speak to that. Our best tool for retaining people in the public service really is having the work environment that the GNWT has and also the benefits package that we’re able to offer to individuals working in the public service.

We would pay equal attention, department by department, on wishing to retain our staff, and our turnover rate has not increased over the years. In fact, it may have come down just a bit. As far as the retention strategy or retention plan that we have, I will have the deputy...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We made the reductions in training and development. We feel that we followed the processes here. We’ve made the reductions in spite of the fact that we had increases of over $1 million that were forced growth increases. That was the Collective Agreement and the fact that we needed to have individuals working on the next collective bargaining process, we still managed to hold the growth to $688,000 by reducing in other areas such as training and development. So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve reduced by that amount.

So I’m not sure that… Well, I think I am sure that the...

It is indicated when we have job competitions, we ask for individuals to give their priority status for the competition. When we go out to job advertisement, individuals will indicate whether they are a priority 1 candidate, Aboriginal indigenous Northerner; or priority 2, non-Aboriginal indigenous Northerner; or priority 3, not having either of those two statuses. In reality, if an individual was here but did not attain any of those two statuses, they may consider themselves a resident of the NWT but would not achieve either of those two statuses or they would be in the same category as...

Mr. Chair, yes we will.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct that both ourselves and the Housing Corporation have spent substantial sums of money to resituate the house, rent equipment to remove ice from that area. Recently, the Member has indicated to me that there may be a solution, so we’ve just begun discussions with the department from my office to talk about that solution of maybe placing the culvert at a different angle and maybe using some heat trace so it doesn’t freeze in there. We’re just beginning to look at that now, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we are anticipating that the cost of gasoline will be lowered in the communities as well. In the case of gasoline, we want to deliver the gas before we make the adjustment. It appears to be a little more volatile and the gas price could actually go back up and we do believe that some of the gas prices have been rising down south and we could feel the impacts here and in other communities. We are going to wait until we do purchase and deliver before we lower it, but we do anticipate that it would be coming down from what the current prices are now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to update Members on some recent activities of the Department of Public Works and Services with regards to fuel prices in communities served by its petroleum products division.

Recent changes in the market have seen oil prices go from all-time highs to record lows over the past year. This current market pricing has provided the petroleum products division with an opportunity to lower its costs and pass on these savings to residents.

The lower wholesale prices for fuel have made it possible to pass savings on to residents now, during the peak of the winter heating season...