Leery
I am very leery of this corporate-welfare job creation/retention business.
While Ubisoft sounds like a good employer, and perhaps, the government and through them the taxpayers will be net beneficiaries of this scheme several years from now.....
But I have a huge problem with taxpayer dollars being used this way.
Some will know from other posts of mine, that I am not adverse to a good suite of public services, including those that help people get jobs and that ameliorate the worst effects of poverty ( ie. Universal Health Care, or free and high quality education) .....
But its one thing to invest in the people who are your citizens, most particularly those who can't afford to invest in themselves......and another to give money to a for-profit business in no real need of the funds, and in the process to muck-with-the-market by picking a winner in a given sector.
At the most superficial levels I see real problems here:
1) Is this the group in society that would most benefit from targeted new government funding? Will this investment produce an equal or greater return than would helping the needier group?
Think of it this way; the help granted to car companies in Canada, approx. 6 Billion as I recall, would be enough if applied to our Universities as an endowment, to replace 1/2 of all tuitions collected! (based on a modest Return on Investment). If because of this reduction, we were able to scale back student aid, and we reapplied that to the post-secondary sector, we could arguably cut 'average tuitions' in Ontario to under $3,000 per annum.
Sounds like a much better investment to me! This would benefit countless hundreds of thousands, and particularly the more needy would see the greater benefit.
2) If one gets into this mucking around one has to ask very straight-forwardly what the price per job is? This is important, because imagine that you chose to put that same amount of money towards someone lower-skill and unemployed (i don't mean as a freebie) but in a modest, but good earning job (let's say $50,000 per year). If you managed to take people off of E.I or Social Assistance or out of Government Housing by giving them said job you would save the gov't money on the expenditure side immediately). Further the best bang-for-the-buck economically occurs the moment you shift people beyond subsistence as they spend virtually every new dollar they earn.
I'm not suggesting a gov't make work project by any means, rather, I am pointing out that you might if properly targeted get double-benefits (removing someone from the expense ledger, not just giving them another high-paying job) and you might also be able to affect more people positively.
That said, I think such a scheme would be difficult, and I'd much rather world on basic opportunities/training/education than get into the employment/make work business.
3) My other concern here is governments getting into the tit-for-tat business.
If we spend big tax dollars to land Ubisoft; then surely Quebec will do the same to get a mining company, North Carolina the same to get a car plant and Mexico the same to get a Walmart warehouse.
Where does it end? Governments agreeing to pay the business community to supply jobs causes a great deal of unease.
4) All other things being equal....who says the jobs would go away or not come here in the first place, even without taxpayer funds?
In the case of the car companies, as an example, were all GM and Chrysler plants shuttered tomorrow, there would be a shortage of cars in North America, even in the current recession. Needless to say, other vehicle makers would have purchased and operated at least some of the factories that would have been affected by a true bankruptcy proceeding.
Would the job losses have been steeper? Quite possibly, but relative to the costs involved, perhaps that would have been the better outcome.
