RE:Hey Pablo145, definitely Bombardier is too political of a company, it is absolutely part of the root cause of its issues. You look at the Alstom deal, if you owned the business would you handover an option to a 3rd party for half your business for 15 months? Of course you would not. You would laugh at them and kick them out of your office - unfortunately, the opposite probably happened, Bellemare probably went over there cap in hand pushed from behind by CDPQ.<br /> <br /> But at the same time, we can't entirely blame the QC govt. In the US, states do not get involved to this extent with bailing out companies. This is the privy of Washington. And if you look at Aviation, all of them that compete(d) with Bombardier - Textron, General Dynamics/Gulfstream and Boeing - are all large military contractors with the crossovers that this entails for the commercial side of their businesses. The same applies in France (Alstom having been bailed out twice).<br /> <br /> So you have to put the large blame on Ottawa. Ottawa did not support Bombardier at all in the past 5 years (and neither did Ontario by the way) nor of course did they grant Bombardier any military contracts (to my knowledge). And so, they were forced into the hands of CDPQ...<br /> <br /> And CDPQ involvement to date has been an unmitigated disaster for the company. Not only the 15% but pushing them into the arms of Alstom. Keep in mind, CDPQ is very independent from govt. Govt only nominates the CEO once every so often.<br /> <br /> Bombardier when you think about it is just another North American industrial company gone downhill. I'm familiar with a couple of these types of enterprises, the root causes are usually the same in my opinion : lack of innovation, focus on short term profitability, high labor costs and huge pension liabilities. Bombardier I think did not lack in innovation if anything, they overdid it (C series). They didn't focus on short term profitability either. But they certainly had high labor costs (still do) and they certainly have huge pension liabilities. And of course, because of dual share structure, they allowed themselves to get into way more debt than they should have.<br /> <br /> Also, they are in aviation. There are specifics to this industry that make it beneficial to be a US company. In particular, once they saw 5 years ago that they did not enjoy the support of Ottawa and the banks (Manley, ex Deputy Liberal PM and now chairman of CIBC, wrote a searing Op-Ed on Bombardier that told you all you needed to know about what Bombardier was up against), they should have started the process of becoming a US company. Ottawa takes action (or doesn't), company has to react. They didn't. I'm not kidding on this - if you're an aviation company and your government doesn't support you by definition you either close shop or move to a country that will support you. <br /> <br /> Jobs in QC would have mostly been retained but they would have enjoyed a lot more govt support in all the ways we enumerated prevoiusly: financing of course, protectoin of duopoly status, trade support, positive media coverage, military business. <br /> <br /> The defined benefit pension plans is a big problem. They were slow to get out of this and of course as we all know, Quebec unions are very strong. Which is why Quebec has to bear part of the burden (for better or worse) (meanwhile Ontario freeloads). US companies have been able to move much faster to defined contribution. Because this was a big part of the dismantlement of companies like GM, US Steel, etc...at one point they all had way more pensioners than they had employees.<br /> <br /> In the final analysis, this is the business Bombardier is in - aerospace. It needs good mgmt (didn't get it), it needs full and unconditional support from Ottawa (didn't get it at all), support from QC (got it from IQ, got the opposite from CDPQ). And so here we are, in debt up to our eyeballs facing an unprecedented economic crisis.