Cancel appalling raises

EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK

You have to wonder what planet Bombardier Inc. CEO Alain Bellemare is living on. According to him, the uproar over the plane and train company raising the compensation of its senior executives by nearly 50 per cent last year came because the firm did “a bad job” explaining why it handed out the generous increases.

That view may hold water in the rarified precincts that Bellemare and his fellow executives occupy. He did, after all, earn $9.5 million in 2016, up from $6.4 million in 2015.

But in the real world the controversy has nothing to do with how the decision was communicated. It has everything to do with the fact that the increase for five top executives to $32.6 million U.S in 2016, from $21.9 million the year before, was outrageous by any standards.

It’s especially galling in light of the fact the company was bailed out to the tune of $1 billion U.S. by Quebec taxpayers last year and another $372.5 million by Ottawa as recently as February.

Now the company thinks public outrage can be assuaged if it simply puts a portion of the planned raises on hold until 2020.

That’s not good enough. The raises should be cancelled — if only because the executives don’t deserve them.

This is a company that by its own admission was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2015. A company that plans to eliminate 14,500 jobs by the end of next year. A company, need we remind Toronto taxpayers, that has had problems delivering streetcars to the TTC and light rail cars to Metrolinx, to the point where the transit agency is suing it.

Bombardier has clearly reached a tipping point. Until now it has been something of a sacred cow in Quebec, regarded as a national champion deserving of support from taxpayers to prop up the high-tech jobs and expertise associated with it.

But now even the Quebec government has lost patience, with the province’s finance minister, Carlos Leitao, saying he and his cabinet colleagues are “shocked” at the fat bonuses paid to the company’s leaders so soon after it pocketed big government loans.

He should be shocked, and so should taxpayers. Bombardier has turned to governments for help so often that it has effectively lost the right to run itself like any other company. Its decision to hand out big bonuses at the top underlines why governments should have insisted on changes to how the company is run before handing over more taxpayer dollars.

It’s also time for Bombardier to listen to the people who cough up the cash that saved their company. Ninety per cent of respondents in a Leger poll published on the weekend said the company’s executives should renounce their salary increases outright.

So they should. Otherwise, as Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong noted, the company risks stoking the fires of populism in Canada.

Indeed, executives at companies across the country should take heed of the protest by hundreds outside Bombardier’s Montreal headquarters. People have clearly had enough of self-serving excuses for outrageous pay increases.

Enough is enough. Bombardier executives should forgo this cash grab and apologize to the taxpayers who have repeatedly bailed them out.

An editorial from the Toronto Star (distributed by The Canadian Press)