Tom Beaulieu

We are having open houses at the Human Resource service centres we have across the territory. We had our very first open house in late November in the HR Service Centre in Fort Simpson, and we’re going to follow up with open houses in Inuvik, Norman Wells and Hay River this month. We are also going to have open houses in Yellowknife on March 12th and 13th, Fort Smith at the end of March, and on May 6, 2014, we will be having our last open house at the HR Service Centre in Behchoko. Thank you.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to pay tribute to the late Joseph Lloyd Sanderson of Fort Resolution, better known as Joe-Joe.

Joe-Joe Sanderson was born March 24, 1958, and passed away on December 7, 2013, at 55 years old. Joe-Joe died of natural causes.

Joe Sanderson was born and raised in Fort Resolution. He attended Grandin College in Fort Smith. Joe was a very athletic person growing up and at one time he was an excellent golden gloves boxing champion in the Northwest Territories and Alberta. But Joe Sanderson was more than that; he was a tremendous athlete. Joe Sanderson was...

Mr. Speaker, at any one given time the Government of the Northwest Territories carries a vacancy of around 10 percent and this is fairly standard, 10 percent of the entire public service. The positions do fluctuate. The various departments have about 1,500 staffing actions per year. So between all of the departments, there is always various staffing actions, so this is a shot that has been fairly consistent throughout the government but it’s like one shot. Almost immediately as this information comes forward it is out of date, but we have to at some point take a spot and say this has been...

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The department has developed a Workforce Planning Strategy across the territory that is designed to fill the positions. Currently, we are looking at each of the vacant positions and why the positions are vacant. Many of them are at the community level, and many times we don’t have the infrastructure to fill those positions, so we are examining an example that I brought forward earlier with the regional recruitment where we might be able to fill the position with an individual that would need approximately one year’s worth of trainings using 20 percent of that individual...

Mr. Speaker, in order to try to reach out to some of the small communities, the department has announced the Regional Recruitment Program. With that program, the department has also hired a regional recruitment specialist that is based in Fort Smith and will be working with all the HR service centres, and also the HR service centres will expand out into the smaller communities. Again, sending the same message out in the communities that the GNWT is available, we have vacant positions that we wish to fill and if people in the communities have the skills and abilities to fill those positions, we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We had attended the career fair in Ottawa to raise awareness about the employment opportunities in the Northwest Territories, to attract people to the GNWT and advise people of the opportunities and advantages of living in the Northwest Territories as one of the strategies to try to increase our population base and fill some positions that are otherwise difficult to fill. Thank you.

As the Member can appreciate, this is a very complex issue. She indicated that earlier on. As Minister of Human Resources, I am prepared to give a detailed briefing on the positions, why some of the positions are vacant, why we’re carrying vacant positions while those jobs are actually being done, but could be done in casual positions.

Some of these positions are vacant because individuals are assigned to other jobs, and some of these positions are vacant because individuals are on leave and so on, so there are various reasons why there is always a 10 percent vacancy, roughly a 10 percent...

Recently, the department has done surveys to determine what the best method was to attract people to the public service, by asking individuals that have come to work for the government how they got their information to come to the government. Only 2 percent of the individuals that came to work for the government had indicated that they had found their position advertised in the paper, so we are doing e-recruit.

A lot of our strategies now have been to do e-recruitment right across the Territories and in the communities. These positions will appear on the website and what we are doing is asking...

I will commit to reviewing the entire project, review that entire project with our senior management team from Yellowknife, and we will report back to the Member in detail as to where the delays occurred in the construction of the Trout Lake Airport.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The work on the embankment of the Trout Lake Airport is now about 95 percent complete, but we did run into some issues with the material. The material that was being used when the construction originally started on the Trout Lake Airport was not of the quality and quantity that was acceptable to the department, so we had to deal with that issue. Now that we’ve had some delays because Trout Lake is not on an all-season road, there are certain times when we can get certain equipment into the community. But the delays are there. We’ve had weather issues, as well, but the...