May 26, 2005

It's already listed in my blogs column, but I wanna do a shout-out to work blog because it's just so goood..

Kind of like how I have long had the conviction that if I could just sit down with gord downie, dustin hoffman, bill murray or leonard cohen for like 10 minutes I am sure we would find many many points of common interest and become fast friends.. I feel certain that the good folk over at work blog are my unrealized kindred spirits in the completely "Anne of Green Gables" sense of the word.

I went for a meeting today at SAJE Service aux aides de jeunes entrepreneurs to see if I am eligable to get an entrepreneurship grant from the province of quebec.

I learned a couple of things.

Some websites are not just bad they are BAAADDD. like; "when you fill out this form don't add more then 200 words to the project description, because it will truncate. No we didn't write max. 200 words anywhere on the form so you would never have known that if you didn't come to this boring-ass powerpoint presentation. Oh yeah, and don't by any means try to fill out this form on anything other than Explorer, because it won't work and you will lose all your carefully completed data on this 50 item form and you will not be able t o click back to save it, oh and no that isn't written anywhere on the site either although you are right - that would be agood idea...

BUt actually what's most frustrating is what I interpret to be a strange evolution of quebecs social contract style governance. Because there are so many programs all specifically geared towards helping some "sector" of the quebec economy who are percieved to need a leg up, these info sessions invariably turn into long-winded explanations of who is NOT eligible.

They could spend as much time explaining how to jump through the hoops of Provincial beaurocracy, and try to help us negoiate our development - instead they spend time telling us who/what/where/when/why is not even permitted to attempt to negiate the hoops.

For example; one funding structure being offered was direcetd at people on unemployment to help them re-enter the workforce. Well fine, that's very admirable but everyone at my info session was either working or like me, worked freelance hence none of us were eligable for that program. Worse yet that program came with a grocery list of inadmissable business plans (like starting a florist - which apparently is a giant money loser, and the Quebec government wants nothing to do with any aspiring florists...?)

Anyways so this pauvre beaurocrat whos job it is to explain to us the budding entrepreneurs what it is we can do to get support to start our businesses spends about 1 . 5 hours explaining this back to work program, to 20 of us, none of whom are eligable.

Various people raise their hands to say, "hey we aren't eligable for this, is there another project we can apply to?" le beaurocrat formidable says "Oui y'en a des autres programs" and then proceeds to explain that there are several others, but that we are here to discuss the project for which no-one is eligable, and if we want to apply for the one which is open to people who are not on EI we will have to go visit our local CDEC....

At one point the BF said; there are 400 of these subventions available and thousands of people interested. I think by making these info sessions into disinfo-sessions they are actively preventing themselves from being flooded by hopeful young florists.

Continued from main page..