TRUDEAU IS MAKING IT INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT BOMBARDIER IS NOT IN THE AEROSPACE AND MASS TRANSIT BUSINESS, BUT IN FACT IS PART OF GOVERNMENT. WHICH PUTS THOSE SUBSIDIES IN A WHOLE NEW LIGHT.

Perhaps I have been wrong about Bombardier. Until this week I had been patiently explaining to readers that the company was not, as its annual reports might suggest, in the aerospace and mass transit business. It is, I suggested, in the subsidy business. Governments, federal and provincial, periodically offer it subsidies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in return for which Bombardier agrees to take them.

That is to say, it supplies governments with the incalculable benefits that come from “rescuing” Bombardier, and thus saving jobs, advancing high-tech, defending Canada, defending Quebec, and other things politicians like to be seen doing.

Mind you, Bombardier is not always such an easy sell. In the most recent such episode, the company publicly disavowed any need for the $375-million “repayable loan” the federal government was pressing upon it, only relenting after the feds agreed not to attach any conditions to the money. (This was on top of the US$1 billion Bombardier had earlier secured from the government of Quebec. Which was on top of a US$1.5-billion payment from the province’s pension plan, the Caisse de Dépôt, in return for a onethird stake in Bombardier’s train business. Which was on top of a $350-million “loan” a previous federal government had granted the company in 2008. Which was on top of a total of more than $2 billion in assistance in the decades before that.)

But all of this presupposes some sort of ordinary business relationship, as between two parties at arms’ length. Whereas it is increasingly clear the federal government, at least, views itself and Bombardier as being one and the same.

This was perhaps most explicit in the prime minister’s announcement earlier this week that the government would refuse to buy military jets from Boeing, though it had earlier said it would, on the grounds that “we don’t do business with a company that’s busy trying to sue us.”

Boeing, of course, is doing no such thing. The suit it has brought before the U.S. International Trade Commission is not against the government of Canada, but Bombardier. It was not Boeing that mistook the interests of the citizens of Canada for those of a private company, or that subordinated a critical military procurement decision to the outcome of a private trade dispute. It was the government of Canada that did that.

That the original decision — to purchase 18 Super Hornet jet fighters from Boeing as an “interim” replacement for the air force’s aging fleet of CF-18s, rather than proceed straight to a permanent replacement — is almost universally regarded as folly is beside the point. It was the Liberal government that insisted the purchase could not wait, having discovered a critical “capability gap” unknown to every independent military expert. It is therefore by its own account placing the security of the country and the safety of its military personnel at risk, in the service of a crude effort to blackmail Boeing into dropping its suit against Bombardier.

That Boeing has a perfect right to seek the protection of its own country’s trade laws; that Canada would be the first to cry foul if the situations were reversed; that Boeing, a global company with annual revenues nearly six times the Canadian defence budget, shows no signs of caving to this amateurish extortion attempt: all these are of secondary importance.

So is the indisputable fact that Bombardier has benefited from massive amounts in government subsidy, not only with regard to the sale of 75 CSeries passenger jets to Delta Air Lines that is the subject of Boeing’s complaint, but on many occasions — as Boeing has done.

No, what is most striking about the current dispute is how completely the government of Canada has come to identify with a single, familycontrolled business. Either it is unaware of how odd this looks, or it does not care.

Of course, this was always true to an extent, if not so bluntly stated. The decision to subsidize Bombardier in the first place meant elevating the interests of a single firm above those of the taxpayer, first, and of the economy, second, via the diversion of capital and labour into a money-losing aerospace manufacturer that might otherwise have been put to more efficient use.

But the goings-on in recent days, with a preliminary decision from the U.S. Commerce Department expected next week, have exceeded all prior standards of corporatism.

Not content with threatening Boeing directly, the prime minister also publicly enlisted Bombardier’s stablemates in the Canadian aerospace sector, no less dependent on government’s goodwill, to put pressure on it. Then there was the even odder spectacle of Bombardier’s union, headed by the Liberals’ new best friend, Jerry Dias, downing tools for a day — though how this was supposed to hurt Boeing’s interests, or advance Bombardier’s, eludes understanding.

There is a strange fever in the air, a hint of the inexplicable, as if not all were quite what it seemed: as if Bombardier were not merely a failing plane-maker and the government not really the government. We must conclude there has been some sort of merger behind the scenes, or perhaps a takeover.

Two possibilities present themselves. Either Bombardier is no longer a private company but an arm of the government. Or — as seems equally plausible — the government of Canada at some point became a whollyowned subsidiary of Bombardier.

If the latter, this would put those periodic government payments to Bombardier in a whole new light: not so much a subsidy, it seems, as a dividend.