Caroline Wawzonek

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, under the current policy, the affirmative action policy, there is still this ranking system that goes on, what everyone knows as the P1s, P2s, but within that you have P1A, P1B, and all these different sorts of ranking depending upon the position, depending upon who's in the position. So there's already complexity within there that categorizes people under different ways depending on the job and then creates this priority listing. Madam Speaker, what we're actually doing now is separating that out so that it is very clear that first there is the...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, this touches on finance as well because this is an area that's going to potentially drive our future economy.

I have to say we did have the opportunity to comment on the federal critical minerals metals strategy before it was final, and I would suggest there are a lot of elements in there that I think reflect exactly on the submission that we made and reflect exactly on what we wanted to see in terms of being a strategy that is now high level. The next step, obviously, proof is in the pudding where are they going to spend their dollars? Those...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, the final version of the critical minerals strategy is still fairly new. I think it was only within the last year they've been doing some consultations on it. And obviously it's difficult for me to say precisely what we hope the federal government may or may not do. What I can say, Madam Speaker, is at this point we have put ourselves in position to be at the second round of tables. They are conducting national resource energy tables right now, "they, the federal government. And we were not initially on round two but we are now. And that process has...

Madam Speaker, I think my first two answers were already long so I'm going to try and get this one shorter, but this one could be longer than the last two.

I'm happy to say that really, we have a lot of those policies. And I certainly wouldn't want the fact that we are now at the next stage of really developing our attention on Indigenous hiring, and of being a representative workforce, to lose sight again of the fact that we do now have the Indigenous Recruitment and Retention Framework. In that, there are action items, and within all of that as well and in conjunction with that, we still have...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, I might draw your attention back to the Indigenous Recruitment and Retention Framework. This was put out I now believe back in December of a couple of years ago. That was the fruit of much research and consultation at that time, looking at a number of barriers across a number of areas that we were going to start to address. You now see, and you'll see in the main estimates, there are targets being set for each department. There are also in addition to that in order to set those targets, there was a labour force statistical analysis conducted in June of...

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document: Report on the Staff Retention Policy for 20192020, 20202021, and 20212022. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm very pleased to have had the assistance of a couple of pages from Yellowknife South this week. Mr. Jude Brothers was here earlier this week. He's not technically in the House anymore, I didn't realize it was his last day, but I am grateful for his assistance. Today, however, we have Larah Peters, and she is also joined by her parents Michele and Ryan Peters. They are up in the gallery and are residents of Yellowknife South. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I certainly do consider this to be one tool in the toolbox of recruitment and retention efforts that are underway within the health authorities and supported by the Department of Finance. The intention again is to ensure that we are finding those positions that have been hard to recruit here in the Northwest Territories and, again, to then pay according to the positions that were discussed between ourselves and the union and looking at the data available about what those positions are. It doesn't mean that every single person employed within the Department...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Walmart's the easy one. Walmart and Loblaws and, in fact, many of the other businesses on Schedule 3 have not bid on any GNWT contracts in over ten years. And in that sense, they're sitting there but they're not really gaining much benefit from being on Schedule 3. Those aren't the difficult circumstances. The more complicated ones are those who are longtime northernbased businesses who have had the benefit of growing and becoming large larger businesses, which is really a good news story for the Northwest Territories and for having those businesses based...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So, Mr. Speaker, there's a number of different things happening with respect to the procurement review. Some already have seen some changes. There's been, for example, vendor performance management is now underway. Contracts are being updated accordingly. There's significant work happening led by EIA on Indigenous procurement, being codeveloped or codetermined with Indigenous parties that would benefit from that. There's also work happening in ITI, Mr. Speaker, around the business incentive policy and around the manufacturing policy to look at ways to improve that. And...