Canada’s largest aerospace company has apparently given up playing coy about its reliance on government support to compete in the large RJ arena. While calling for the federal government in Ottawa to help pay for the development of a new family of 100- to 125-seat jets, Bombardier president and CEO Paul Tellier threatened to build the airplane at the company’s Short Brothers division in Belfast, N. Ireland, if a substantial part of the estimated $1.5 billion needed for the project didn’t come from state coffers. “We have a first-class facility with an excellent labor force in Belfast,” said Tellier. “There is in the UK a strong export-financing agency, so therefore all these factors come into account.”
As if to impress upon the ministers in Ottawa he wasn’t bluffing, Tellier hired CAE and Boeing executive Gary Scott specifically to head the studies into its technical and commercial feasibility. That, after the company announced it would slash 680 positions at Bombardier Transportation’s facilities in Burnaby, British Columbia; Kingston and Thunder Bay, Ontario; and Montreal ahead of a sweeping purge of some 6,600 employees worldwide last month.
