This is an idea that has been tossed around for a couple of years as an incentive, particularly to small and medium-sized business. This has come out of our experience with an internship program in Toronto called Career Bridge. It's a four- to twelve-month program. The employers pay for it, and it's $10,000 for four months. So they're actually paying the stipend that goes to the individual, plus a program fee to the organization.
The program has been very successful with the big banks, the insurance companies, the large corporations, because they have the ability to allocate these resources in a central HR budget. They may not even distribute them to particular business lines.
Where the program is having trouble being picked up is with small and medium-sized business, which may not be able to do that kind of forecasting or allocate that kind of investment. So we thought that if there were some kinds of incentives to drive them toward that opportunity.... I think Amy also mentioned these in her presentation.
We haven't costed this out. We don't know what it would actually come to, but I think it's worth investigation. I think it's worth having the government research the cost benefit of that, because what we do know from the successful outcome is that over 80% of the interns will be hired full time at the end of their internships, meaning their long-term trajectory in Canada will include their making a larger contribution. They'll be paying taxes sooner and will be productive. In that sense, the program will pay for itself. But we don't have the hard numbers at this time.