Consider what job protection is. Fundamentally it is just a way to spread the risk of unemployment for part-time soldiers returning from tours. This is fair in a general sense because we all benefit from their service, but the question is who else should pay the premiums for this type of unemployment insurance? Is it fair that the risk is taken only by the business people? Is job protection the most cost-effective way to generate forces?
My personal solution to the problem was just to quit my job and get a new job later but even this simple a solution costs the businessman time and money, hiring and training a new guy. With job protection this cost remains plus he has to fire the new guy, or keep a redundant employee, if the new guy has a union. Remember, the role of a business is to be efficient and to create a profit for the owners. (If you have a problem with that we should have another discussion about free enterprise, and how we defeated the Soviet Union.) As it stands now business bears the cost of employees taking tours out of a spirit of public service, and it comes out of the surplus they have created by being efficient in other areas.
Inefficient, unprofitable businesses fail, and then the job is gone anyway. Are we also proposing employee protection legislation to compensate businesses for losing some of their best employees for extended periods? The risk obviously has to be spread further, ie to the taxpayers. So maybe we extend unemployment insurance to cover this situation, with the premiums coming out of DND's budget? This still doesn't remove the administrative burden from the employer as he still has to find a new guy and train him, and now do the pogey paperwork as well.
Here is the cheapest solution for the taxpayer. First, take all the money, and paperwork that would have been used to create a bunch of jobs for the likes of CUPE to administer an expanded pogey system, and hire some more reg force. Second, continue to use the militia to lift keen citizens out of the mire of their crappy dead end civvy jobs by giving them life skills and interesting tours that also top up bank accounts, and sometimes even gives them marketable job skills. When they get home, the University will still be there, and Burger King will be happy to see them back. In other words, we don't have to fix this system, it as efficient as it is going to get.
There are a number of people (like me) who want tours but their jobs and family situation prevent it. To paraphrase Joseph Heller: 'This war is important. Somebody has to do tours of Afghanistan for their country. It doesn't have to be me.' Forcing the business people to pay a tax to support my habit is unfair, and forcing the other taxpayers to pay is inefficient. If you give up a $100,000 dollars a year to be in the show for $100 a day that is entirely your problem. As far as the taxpayers are concerned, stay in your job, and we'll take your $30,000 of tax money and pay somebody else to train for it full time.
If you want to go, join the Regs, or work it out with your boss. The patriotic thing for your boss to do is run an efficient business, create wealth, and pay his taxes so the Govt can hire more full-time soldiers. Sorry, I feel your pain, but you have to sort out your priorities.
PS Having re read my post it seems I've also made the argument that efficiency requires the wealthy to risk their money while the poor risk their lives but that is a separate and much older issue, eh?