The first point is that the employer will not be required to provide paid leave. The leave will be paid out of the EI account. It's not that the employers themselves are going to have to be subsidizing the leave from their payroll while the individual isn't there.
We are consulting with training institutions, employers and labour right now on the program design because it won't kick in until the end of 2020, so those are important questions you're raising.
I would say that the philosophy behind the account is that the training benefit accrues to the individual, and that, in a world where work is becoming more precarious, the individual may be choosing to upgrade their skills to do something different. The “something different” could be within the company, such as moving from one position to a different position in the company that requires different work. In principle, it could also see them moving from an employer where they're, say, in a minimum wage job at Tim Hortons, and they want to move to a different stream.
That's something we'll be dealing with in the consultations, but philosophically the trainee is not restricted to exactly what they're doing now or what their employer covers.