First of all, under the Canada job grant, many employers will have less skin in the game because they'll be getting government grants, whereas before they weren't. That's an issue. But how is a high school graduate in Nova Scotia going to get the skills they need to get a job in Alberta under the Canada job grant? Is an employer going to train them so they can get a job somewhere else for some other employer? I don't think so.
There is something to be said for on-the-job training, and I'm very much in favour of it. We don't do enough of it. But that's not the be-all and end-all of training. There is a lot of downsides. Employers, as we've mentioned, small and medium-sized enterprises, don't have human resource departments. There's no way they're going to be able to develop meaningful training programs.
There are also other issues. There's a concept, for those of you who took first-year economics, of spillover effects. If you know you can train someone but that training is portable, your money might end up benefiting your competition's firms. That's a classic case in economics of under-investment.
How do people who aren't currently employed by a great firm that wants to do training get access to the Canada job grant fund? There doesn't seem to be any way to do that. Will they get the kind of skills training they need? It's not in my view--and I'm trying to be very non-partisan about and non-ideological--a well-designed program from a policy perspective.