In the television show Bojack Horseman, a character once said, “time’s arrow does not stand still or reverse, but only marches forward.” This means you cannot stop progress, so why do we try when it comes to our factory jobs?

Yes, once more, a closure is making the news and impacting workers in an industrial space in Canada. This time it is workers at a GM plant in Oshawa, Ont. Now, to be fair, I cannot imagine the uncertainty faced by these workers and I certainly do not want anyone to go hungry or broke. But what I utterly loathe is when, time after time, officials try to avoid inevitable ends.

In the years to come and as robotics get more sophisticated, the romantic notion of working on an assembly line will be a thing of the past. It will join the Dodo, Blockbuster Video, skinny Donald Trump and the political career of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the ash pile of human history.

As I write this, politicians are offering workers help and Unifor, a successor to previous unions for Canadians in the automotive industry, has pledged to “fight like hell” to keep the plant open. But this is just prolonging the inevitable. What workers need is a new, robust and permanent retraining program in order to avoid the hit from future layoffs, which will happen.

Again, to be fair, there are initiatives that do what I describe, but right now they are a patchwork across different provinces and levels of government.

In addition, they are at times not all they are made out to be.

In 2010, The Globe and Mail reported on a man who went through Ontario’s Second Career program. At the time, it was not fully funded, so the man they spoke to (who was downsized from a job at Chrysler) ended up paying $1,000 a month on costs not covered by the initiative. This should not be touted as the lifeline for someone transitioning career fields, not any time.

Over in Alberta, there is a $40 million program to assist coal workers as they transition into other industries ahead of the planned phase-out, but at the time of its announcement last year, Parkland County Mayor Rod Shaigec called it disappointing, as the consequences were not thought out to him.

These sorts of random efforts at all levels of government and only when things get bad need to become a thing of the past.

Cities, provinces and the federal government need to forget about the tax incentives, stop intervening and come together and create something new that current workers can use to gain new skills for the future while working on a current job which will eventually die and not while unemployed and hurting.

Forget the current different programs and to be frank, screw the past. Blacksmithing is not a major industry anymore, why hold on to something else with roots originating in the early 1900s?

epretzer@postmedia.com