8% unemployment in Canada

Losing your job can be a traumatizing experience. Depending on your relationship with uncertainty, it can give you a tremendous amount of stress which leads to other health problems. If you think about it, though, getting laid off can be a great time to reorient your life. If you were laid off, chances are that the industry you were working in is in trouble. In this case, going back to school, or getting new training seems like a smart thing to do. As an example, the CSMO-ESAC has training programs that everyone can enter to gain theoretical and practical knowledge in certain fields. They are partnering with companies to offer those courses. The provincial government also takes punctual actions to relocate those hit by mass layoffs into more competitive sectors of the economy.

The point is that, as a society, you want to support the industries that have long term viability. However, as a government, you need to see to the needs of those who have fallen on hard times. The simplest way to do this in the employment area is to prevent layoff by subsidizing dying industries. Eventually, the only things that are keeping those industries viable on international markets are the government subsidies. But those subsidies are sending the wrong message to the markets: they are saying that the industry is a profitable one. After a while, investors and entrepreneurs start to increase but realize quickly that they too need subsidies to survive. In the end, the governments increases payments until it has no breathing room and has to cut spending, killing the whole industry. I fear that this is something that may happen to the forestry industry if it doesn't recycle itself.

All this to say that the government might want to institutionalize career switching formations as it would be like hedging your life choices. As unemployment rises they will have to deal with more and more people looking for these types of programs but as the recession ends, there might still be people within ineffective industries living precariously on the "governmental respirator" that could benefit from the programs.