This afternoon, the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce in Shediac hosted a lunch headlined by New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant.
Disclaimer #1: I should note that I didn't vote for him in last year's election (because I legally couldn't), and he's so new to the job that I have no idea whether or not I'd regret any vote I might have made.
But I do give him credit for making a fair case for a program that would essentially pay the salary of a young person for the first six months on the job at a qualifying business.
Disclaimer #2: I wouldn't qualify for the program either as employer or employee, so I don't have a proverbial horse in the race here either.
When I read about the idea, I wrote it off as yet another corporate giveaway. But after today I'm willing to take a more nuanced view. If the statistics from other provinces don't have too many asterisks, an ~80% success rate (of keeping the employee working at the same or related field) is more than acceptable. (Bonus: Telling those whining about not being able to find ready-made skills or fund the expense of training to put up or shut up would be awesome, IMO.)
As a taxpayer, however, I would hope that there would be penalties for abusing the program. More importantly, I would insist on an additional and verrrrrrry long string attached to subsidising a half-year of someone's wage. Namely, that the all data (employee's name excepted) be publicly available on the government's website.
It's not just a matter of accounting to the taxpayers. The (much) more important public service would be an ongoing record of which employers have a track record of not keeping young employees beyond the six month free ride. That tells not only potential employees, but also potential vendors which companies are run by people who expect to get something for nothing.
Please understand that it's not that I think that New Brunswick is rife with that particular species of business owner. It's just that even one of them can cause serious damage to a small contractor (like myself) or a supplier. Sadly, this can happen even with signed contracts. Assuming the aggrieved vendor is able to weather the setback, that cost is ultimately passed on to other, better-mannered clients. So you'd better believe that checking the public records would be part of my routine due diligence on anyone I'm considering working with.
Given appropriate penalties for abuse plus public record-keeping, I can, in principle anyway, get behind the proposal. Because then, not only would it promote business growth, the business intelligence could prevent losses elsewhere in the economy. Besides, weeding out inefficiencies (in which category I include deadbeats) is what free market capitalism is supposed to be about, riiiiiiiiiight???
