There are any number of them, and I think you've put your finger on it. It often tends to be the larger corporations that have the resources and that are in highly internationally competitive markets. It's pretty clear that whether their workforce is, by normal standards, relatively small and lean or larger, a competitive market will dictate that their employee workforce be highly trained and highly productive. There's an individual incentive for these corporations to make that investment. You have to have the pockets with which to do that.
The classic problem in Canada has been underprovision of training at the firm level. The problem for small and medium-sized firms is partly one of resources to make the investment, but the other major problem, which people were talking about 30 years ago, is poaching. There's very little incentive to engage in significant investment if you think that your investment will be poached by the firm down the road. I remember being asked to talk about recruitment and retention in the oil patch in Alberta years ago. I went out there and I looked at the situation on the ground. The problem was in engineering. These people were all being poached. There is a certain amount you can do in terms of human resource management policies and worker-friendly policies, but at the end of the day, in fine style I guess, my recommendation was to keep paying them more. At the end of the day, the major market factor driving turnover was a very hot competitive external market.
In the meantime, if firms are investing in those workers, they're losing that investment—there's no question about that. It's very difficult to get around that. If you look at the very top, major corporations, whether Bombardier or Vale or any of those kinds of companies, such as PotashCorp, they're now in international markets, so it's not just a matter of losing people to a corporation down the road or in the next province; it's internationally. The nuclear industry is another great example of that. We have people coming in from all over the world to work in the nuclear industry and we have people going elsewhere in the nuclear industry. There is a little micro-example of the same thing in mining engineering.
So it true, I think, that the capacity for employer-based training is better in the large corporations, but the classic problem is poaching.