Last week, Saskatchewan labour leaders held a press conference to publicly criticize the provincial government’s scrapping of the Aboriginal Employment Development program and, along with it, dozens of partnership agreements with businesses, companies and organizations in the province aimed at bolstering Aboriginal employment.
Tom Graham, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the agreements brought together all the parties concerned in workplaces, and required each of them to address barriers to training, hiring and retaining First Nations and Metis workers.
He said the union’s responsibility in such agreements was to design and deliver Aboriginal awareness and misconception training.
“We found that the training was incredibly popular . . . (our members and employers) wanted facts and some understanding of Aboriginal issues and were prepared to enter into this to help with retention, certainly, in the workplace and the health of the workplace,” said Graham.
The holistic approach of the agreements worked much better than affirmative action hiring policies, said Graham.
NDP MLA Warren McCall said 40,000 people in Saskatchewan had received cultural awareness training under the agreements forged by the program.
First Nations and Métis Relations Minister Bill Hutchinson, however, called the program “old and tired” and said corporations and public sector entities such as school divisions, health regions and municipalities have the determination and financial resources to hire more Aboriginal people without the help of taxpayer dollars.
But even he acknowledged that “what they need is access to the right information.”
Clearly the program, and the agreements forged under it, filled a need in Saskatchewan workplaces: the building of cultural awareness.
Hutchinson may be right to say there is no longer a need for taxpayer dollars to help in the hiring of Aboriginal people. But there is a need to help retain them once they are hired, and that is definitely fostered by a healthy workplace.
The Saskatchewan Party needs to revisit its cut of a program that provided a valuable service to all of the province’s workers.
