BEGGING TO BAIL YOU OUT.

It seems like just a few weeks ago that everyone was tut-tutting Donald Trump for using Twitter threats of a border tax to keep the maker of Carrier air conditioners from moving jobs out of the States. Well, actually, it was just a few weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blasted what it called Trump’s “shakedown,” with bad economics that would “hurt workers and the economy.”

But Americans could have it worse. Up here in Canada, it’s taxpayers who always find themselves on the receiving end of job- preserving shakedowns, the latest being Tuesday’s announcement from the federal Liberals that they would be handing Bombardier $ 372 million as an “an investment in thousands of middle-class jobs.”

Perhaps Ottawa’s carrot, in the form of giving a company money in hopes it will keep jobs at home, looks less obnoxious than Trump’s stick, a threat to take money from a company if it ships jobs away, although it’s hard to see much difference.

But at least after Trump tweeted Carrier into submission he got a firm commitment from the company to cancel plans to send hundreds of Indiana jobs to Mexico.

Nothing in this Bombardier announcement stipulates anything so irresponsibly uneconomic as requiring the company to promise to keep jobs here that would be more efficiently done elsewhere, or even promising to create new ones.

There is no need for Bombardier to invest anything more in the economy than it otherwise planned to. Ottawa calls the $ 372 million a “repayable loan,” which also has an inoffensive ring to it, but don’t put much stock in that. There’s no complete record on whether such “loans” are ever repaid. Bombardier forcefully fights requests for those public disclosures in court. And it wins.

In fact, Tuesday’s announcement specified no details of the terms of the loan at all. No repayment schedule, or whether Bombardier put up any assets to secure it, as any private lender would naturally require.

But then, if Bombardier were interested in the features of a normal lending arrangement, it could have just borrowed from a normal lender. And that would be silly, when politicians proved so eager to fork over cash with so few strings attached.

The Liberals clearly put in much effort to get Bombardier to even agree to take the money. They had to buckle on virtually every condition they had originally stipulated Bombardier must meet before it could have access to any federal cash. First they said Bombardier would have to make a “business case” for why it needed a $1.3-billion bailout — to match one from Quebec — for its struggling CSeries program.

That was in November 2015. But then the aerospace company’s executives rather smirked at that condition, when they publicly stated, not long afterward, that they didn’t really need the money anyway.

“Really, the federal funding would just be an extra endorsement” for its CSeries program, said Bombardier vicepresident Rob Dewar last March. “That’s really just an extra bonus that would be helpful but is very clearly not required.”

Next the Liberals talked of wanting changes to Bombardier’s family- run dual- class governance structure. But then it turned out they didn’t even feel confident enough to put those stipulations to the company.

Running out of demands, the government floated a lastditch “six- point checklist” that it wanted satisfied, including figuring out why previous handouts to Bombardier had only led to more. With Bombardier having accumulated more than $ 2 billion in aid from various levels of government since the 1960s, perhaps the Liberals were considering that it might be wise if the handouts would, at some point, finally stop.

That there seems to have been no longer any desire to get tough on Bombardier over governance, over its “business case,” or even over an undemanding six- point checklist is itself the answer to the question of why the giveaways never stop ( the previous Conservative government, too, handed Bombardier $ 350 million in 2008 to develop the CSeries). They can’t, they won’t, and they don’t stop because politicians are more hooked on Bombardier handouts than the company itself is.

As Bombardier’s executives point out, they’re now past the worst of their troubles, which hit their nadir roughly a year ago, back when the federal government first started talking about attaching conditions to federal aid. Last year, the CSeries booked 117 orders for new planes, after winning none during a particularly miserable 2015.

Big names like Air Canada and Delta stepped up. Swiss Air, started flying the plane commercially and was praising to the skies the CSeries’ reliability, its reduced cabin noise and improved light, and its “intuitive flying experience.” Bombardier’s shares have more than tripled in the last year.

Far from looking like a failure, then, the CSeries suddenly looks like a successful, innovative globally admired product — and the Liberals, having stalled on providing any federal aid, had no way to claim any credit at all for it. Why, Canadians might just begin to get the idea that federal government involvement isn’t even necessary for companies to compete globally.

The federal Liberals were left with little choice. If Bombardier wasn’t going to shake Ottawa down, the Liberals would just have to go ahead and shake down themselves.

Even there, their efforts fell pitifully short. Coming up with just a fraction of the original $ 1.3 billion that Quebec politicians had expected, the Bloc Québécois scoffed it was “too little, too late.”

The federal Liberals could barely even get a piece of the CSeries; Bombardier said most of the money would instead now go to its Global business jet program, which has been around for 20 years. Compared to Trump’s shakedowns, the Liberals efforts compare pitifully. Sad! Troublingly, that can only mean they’ll keep trying until they get better at it.