Generally speaking, government programs do not favour small businesses. There is usually a fair bit of paperwork that has to be filled out to access them, and they tend to benefit larger firms more than smaller firms.
Anybody can have a subjective opinion as to what's too much and what's too little. When you find small firms in particular struggling to obtain some kind of subsidy or something to incent their hiring of young people—of course you have to tax them to pay for that program—it's much better to leave the money in the businesses' hands to spend as they choose. We've seen a lot of evidence over the years that they make much better decisions for their own businesses, usually because their own livelihood is at stake in the process, than some government bureaucrat does.
There's such a plethora of programs of many different kinds, but there's very rarely any measurement of how effective they are. It would be good if we could have sunset clauses on a lot of these programs so that they would basically go away or die in a few years, or whatever is an appropriate time period, and then we could assess whether they really created jobs and did what they were intended to do. We don't have that now. So many of these programs aren't measured at all, and often they're driven more by political concerns than economic concerns: “What riding is this business in? Is it in a riding that my party won in the last election?” I've seen that far too often over the years. That's not a good criteria for spending taxpayer money. It should measurable and it should boost the economy, not simply be a politically motivated slush fund.
Of course we've seen subsidies to really inappropriate industries. Maybe it doesn't seem to directly involve the whole youth unemployment issue, but when you're spending billions and billions on failed businesses—electric vehicles is a very good example of that; we've seen many fiascos in that area—that takes money away from every business in the economy, and not just small firms, to be able to hire properly and pay their employees properly.