Remember how every computer in the world crashed, all at the same time, and we were forced to revert to our pre-industrial revolution lifestyles? No? Doesn’t ring a bell? That’s because it never happened.

And because it didn’t happen, we forget just how certain so many people were that it was going to happen. But they were. Its dangerous when we make really big mistakes in judgment and then forget about them too soon.

The Spanish philosopher and essayist Jorge Santayana famously observed that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That’s why it is useful for us to all pause for a bit and take note of something that has been happening (as well as something that hasn't been happening) over the course of the last few years. The thing that has been happening is that portable licensing for security licensees has become the “new normal” in several Canadian provinces. The thing that hasn’t happened is that none of the dire predictions about what a catastrophe portable licensing would be for the security industry have come true.

Portable licensing arrived in Manitoba over three years ago, in Ontario over two-and-a-half years ago, and in BC over a year and a half ago. (It is arriving in Alberta even as you read this.) And has the result been that guards have become itinerant mercenaries wandering around to a different employer every night of the week?

Has the result been that proprietary secrets are now getting tossed around like so many pirated media downloads? Have guards, emboldened by the power they now hold as independent contractors, started imposing exorbitant wage level demands on their employers? Hardly. None of this has happened.

Guards still prefer full-time jobs to part-time jobs, and still prefer working for one regular employer over working for five employers at a time. Security employees still understand that they are ethically and legally compelled to respect the confidentiality of information that they come into possession of during the course of their employment.

And wage levels are still dictated by high level non-security management decision makers who don’t understand what security guards actually do and who don’t therefore see why there is any particular reason to pay them anything approaching a decent living wage.

What has happened in those jurisdictions where portable licensing has been introduced is that employers now have to expend a lot less time and money getting their new hires licensed, because most of their new hires now walk in the front door with their licenses already in their hands.

Those who were running around like Chicken Little a few years back, saying that portable licensing was going to cause the sky to fall in on the security industry, were wrong in their dire predictions. It is important to acknowledge this because a new “threat” looms over much of the security industry in Canada, and that is the grim spectre of mandatory training and testing.

Mandatory training has just arrived in Ontario, it will arrive within a year in Alberta, and it will come soon after that to Quebec and Nova Scotia. And lots of people are predicting doom for the contract security industry. The supply of prospective employees for the security industry, we are told, will dry up like interest in the playoffs after the last Canadian team is knocked out.

Problem is, it’s just not true. It didn’t happen in B.C. in 1996, it didn’t happen in Saskatchewan in 2001, and it didn’t happen in Manitoba in 2007. Nor is it going to happen in Ontario, Alberta, or anywhere else.

Training will be taken, tests will be written, licenses will be issued, guards will be hired, and the world will keep on turning. Y2K didn’t take us out in 2000. A worldwide swine flu pandemic didn’t take us out last year. The Aztec Calendar isn’t going to take us out in 2012. And mandatory training for security guards was never even a serious contender. People can just relax.