By Tim Kiladze

Unlike the current federal government, Dalton McGuinty wants you to know that he cares about your job. And by dishing out $355 million for Employment Ontario’s Second Career program, he’s showing it in a big way. This initiative was developed to help laid-off workers go back to school in order to learn a new skill set, and it definitely couldn’t have come at a better time.
Formally, Second Career is a partnership between Ontario colleges, public and private employers, and Employment Ontario that provides as much as $28,000 in grants to cover tuition, books, and living expenses for 20,000 workers who have been laid off. (The key word being “grants,” not loans.) More than just funding, though, the program provides career counselling for applicants to help determine the hot job sectors in their communities and the fields of work best suited for them. The two-year re-training programs are also much longer than the six-month initiatives that some colleges now offer.
Currently, the majority of in-demand jobs are found in health care, mining, road construction, and power generation. In the case of the latter, both Ontario Power Generation and Hydro One have been two of Second Career’s principal employment sponsors, and they have stressed how highly they think of its graduates. Because this praise has been so strong, the government is pulling out all the stops to lure more students. Enticements include offering more than the $28,000 in select cases to cover the costs of things such as child care and working with colleges to provide flexibility on their intake timelines; most programs only enrol students in September, frustrating workers who are laid off half-way through the academic year.
Faced with the potential of at least one Big 3 automaker going bankrupt, those who oppose bailing out corporations have raised their voices once again. Fortunately for those who have been laid off, these voices will have trouble arguing against the benefits of Second Career—the program is being sold as an investment in individuals that simply re-directs taxpayers’ money back into their own pockets. In the time of TARP and other complex programs, it may not be the most novel of ideas, but it sure resonates with those it will immediately help.
Photo by purplepick from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.