Tom Beaulieu

Mr. Speaker, related experience does matter. Minimum qualifications, as far as education goes, and related experience matter. It’s written in most job descriptions, if not all job descriptions, that we receive from the department. If an individual has directly related experience in the job they’re applying for, it has a significant impact on whether or not the individual gets hired. If a person has directly related experience, education that may not be directly related, but many years of directly related experience as the Member is talking about today, we will not screen that individual out...

We can discuss this with the departments. The departments do the job descriptions and through their knowledge, skills and abilities that are typically required for a position that they’re posting. So they need to do a certain job; there are tasks that have to be done; the department determines what type of qualifications that individual needs to carry in order to do that job. So, if we’re discussing with the department on looking at those qualifications that maybe a job with a different type of task in there may be sufficient, then we’ll have that discussion. I’m more than willing and prepared...

Mr. Speaker, the Aboriginal employees are all employees that were affected by the financial shared services. Regionally there were 16, and 15 in headquarters, so 31 people were affected by the position, and the majority of them were placed into jobs with the government. I think there is a possibility that a couple of the specific cases where individuals may have been applying for the positions that would have been considered an advancement did not get the jobs, but my understanding is that there were some discussions held with these individuals. I don’t have the specifics on the individuals...

Thank you. The office space construction is not over budget. There has been no requirement for change order. The only thing that we have changed is that we have moved money from the previous year back because the office space construction was ahead of schedule. But the bottom line is that we went in with a certain budget and we’re well within that budget. Thank you.

My understanding is we haven’t created a great amount of vacancy. In fact, we are still looking for some office space for some of the departments that are not moving out of lease space. That building will be filled by Department of Transportation and the Department of Health. The information I have here doesn’t indicate that that building is going to create any hardship at all for any of the office people that provide office space, any of the businesses that are providing office space to the GNWT. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, jobs for Northerners are a priority of all Members of this Assembly. For the Government of the Northwest Territories, the NWT Public Service Strategic Plan and the Workforce Planning Strategy provide multi-pronged approaches to build capacity through recruitment, development and retention. I would like to provide Members an update on some of these initiatives being led by the Department of Human Resources.

Partnering with Aboriginal and community governments through secondment opportunities to build capacity is a win-win. Secondments provide employees with the opportunity to become...

Thank you. The information I have is that the office space vacancy in the city of Yellowknife will be between 5 and 7 percent, which is considered to be a healthy vacancy. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do not have the cost-benefit analysis of the savings between the construction of this building and continuing to lease office space. What I do have is the initial evaluation when we were going into building this office space. We were looking at the amount of space that we are leasing versus the amount of space that we own and ensuring we have a good balance for the city of Yellowknife. Thank you.

We have not set targets as a department. We are asking all of the departments to come forward with the positions that we are hoping to fill with the Regional Recruitment Strategy. Once we have all the departments who have identified their positions, then we, as the Department of Human Resources, will go back and engage those departments to make sure that there aren’t more positions that can go under this strategy. At that point, we will set targets of how many positions we hope to fill using the Regional Recruitment Strategy. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Any policy change that would occur would have been to try to accommodate the Regional Recruitment Strategy. As I indicated, we have discussed this and signed an MOU with the Union of Northern Workers. So, there hasn’t been anything put in place to make it difficult for individuals to apply. In fact, it’s been the other way around. We are trying to accommodate this. Now that interest is starting, we are hoping we will have our first employee underneath the Regional Recruitment Strategy this month and more in April. We’re going to get some employees in March and April through the strategy and...