At a very quick glance, this seems like a rational conclusion. A trained guard is a more valuable commodity than an untrained guard. Trained guards will expect their employers to pay them more, their employers will in turn expect their clients to pay more for these new and improved guards, and the clients will in turn have no choice but to pay the new higher market rates. Heck, clients will probably be happy to pay more, now that they are getting a higher quality product in return for their investment.

Sadly, this isn’t the way it has happened in provinces which have introduced mandatory training in the past (B.C. in 1996, Saskatchewan in 2000, Manitoba in 2007), nor is there any sound reason to think that it will happen in any of the jurisdictions that have mandatory training on the way (Ontario in 2010, Alberta in 2011, both Quebec and Nova Scotia sometime within the next few years).

Wage levels in the contract security services industry are set by the market forces of supply and demand. You hardly ever meet an owner or manager of a contract security services business who doesn’t want to pay his or her personnel more than they are getting right now. But they are all constrained by two irresistible forces — the desire to make at least some profit from what they are doing and the need to compete for contracts in a highly competitive market.

The wage levels of contract guards are set by the end-users who contract for guard services. There are clients out there who will pay a company $30/hour in order to get $20/hour guards because they think that a $20/hour guard is worth the difference in price compared to a $14/hour guard. But there aren’t enough of these clients out there yet to keep very many guard companies afloat using this business model. Most guard companies bidding on most contracts have to bid fairly close to the rest of the pack in order to have a chance.

It’s true that if everybody who bid on a contract ”“ all the guard companies out there — all just kicked their quoted rates up by $5 an hour, clients would have to pay more. But that isn’t going to happen.

Some think that guard companies will have to raise their pay rates because mandatory training will dry up the supply of cheap labour and they will have to pay more just to attract qualified new hires. But this is unlikely to happen, either. Mandatory training consists of a 40-hour course that it is going to cost a prospective licensee no more than about $500 to take. (And which can be obtained from any one of a hundred private training schools in strip malls, all of whom are competing with each other by advertising lower and lower tuition levels. )

A minimum wage earner in Ontario will soon gross more than $800 on his first paycheque (based on two-week pay period when the minimum wage rises to $10.25/hr Mar. 31, 2010). The experience in provinces which have introduced mandatory training in past has been that the cheap labour supply hasn't dried up, because people find different ways to get hold of the $500 for training. And this is because the unemployed person who is getting no paycheque and will find the $500 somewhere if he knows that he is going to make more than that much back during his first month on the job.

Wage levels for contract security guards should go up. And perhaps they will, over time. But they are not going to go up because the government says that guards have to take a 40-hour course before they can get licensed. They will go up as more and more clients decide to act on the belief that when it comes to security services, you get what you pay for.