Another Quebec company with close Liberal Party ties is in trouble, being accused by the World Bank of bribery and corruption. It’s another case of big corporation, big government collusion. (And leftists, don’t smirk: the collusion between big unions, big government, big corporations, and the NDP specifically, and pretty much exclusively, are even easier for me to write about. Also, see the fact that most giant corporations are now often led by and therefore often staffed by overtly left-wing, sometimes full-on socialism-promoting, social justice warriors and big-government face-lickers. Still smirking?)
Nobody is angelic here except me and maybe you. The World Bank — the accuser — is itself a giant, big government bureaucracy with its own record of trouble. Read Forbes 2012 article “World Bank Spins Out Of Control: Corruption, Dysfunction Await New President.”
Bombardier is all about garnering favors from governments — any government — but mostly Canada’s. And just as in the case of the allegations against Bombardier and their sisters SNC-Lavalin, Bombardier seems to feel as though it needs to give money (from whence it came?) to politicians in order to curry their favor.
Manifestly, Bombardier seems to be as much about building trains, planes, and Skidoos, as sucking up taxpayer cash — the latest if which was a government loan (of taxpayer cash) by the Liberals in 2017 to the tune of $375 MILLION (ah… that’s from whence it came!). But while taxpayers send countless wads of their honestly-earned cash to Bombardier, it’s not at all two-way street — or to put it another way, it’s a two-way street but taxpayers are banned from that street — only politicians and Bombardier and their agents are allowed.
Bombardier may pay taxes, I honestly don’t know since they always seem to be reaching out for more and more taxpayer cash, but Bombardier has been alleged to have given great big pallets of cash (from whence…) to politicians in second and third world countries, and Canadian politicians too. We know they have given cash to all Canadian political parties including even the extreme-left NDP (presumably in case we are found to be approaching the apocalypse). But mostly, as I read it, they give to Liberals, just as most giant corporations do. And as is so often the case, the ties are tighter than even money. There are tons of articles about this, but here’s an old one:
Bombardier ties with Ottawa run deep
Globe and Mail, 2001Chairman Laurent Beaudoin is a personal friend of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s, and an outspoken federalist who rallied to Mr. Chrétien’s side in the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum. Robert Brown, the current president and chief executive officer of the company, is a former senior assistant deputy minister in the federal Industry department. Pierre Pichette, the company’s director of public affairs, previously held a parallel post at the Department of Foreign Affairs. The company is also a major donor to the federal Liberal Party. …
… Former Liberal premier Daniel Johnson sits on Bombardier’s board, while Pierre Lortie — a former chief executive assistant to then-finance minister Raymond Garneau in Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government of the early 1970s — is president and chief operating officer of Bombardier Capital, and next month takes over as head of Bombardier Transportation.
Bombardier Inc. executive vice-president Yvan Allaire — a key adviser to Mr. Beaudoin — was one of the three founders of Secor, an influential consultancy firm that has strong links to the provincial Liberals and was also close to Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney.
In an interesting twist, Pierre MacDonald — a former Bombardier executive and Quebec Liberal cabinet minister — is currently a director of the Export Development Corporation, the Crown corporation from which the federal loan guarantees would come in the proposed Air Wisconsin deal.
Collusion is one problem amongst the various liberal-left factions. Operating like a giant crime family seems to be another.
And a National Post story:
$1.5 million — The Bombardier legacy
Bombardier has never been shy about asking for government money. But then the Montreal-based company hasn’t been shy about giving it out either. Since 1993, Bombardier has doled out nearly $1.5 million to federal politicians. In the 1990s, contributions were split between (some) parties — with tens of thousands of dollars going to the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party. In 1999-2000, even the NDP racked up about $5,000 in donations. All that was before electoral finance reforms, which barred corporations from making donations at the federal level. Bombardier’s last major donation was a $139,795 contribution to the Liberal Party in 2003.
Other governments and companies know Bombardier’s ties to government funding and politicians are rich, too. For example, recall the recent trade dispute in which Boeing charged that Bombardier benefited from Canadian government subsidies and unfair pricing, in a complaint to U.S. authorities. It’s a case Bombardier would have lost. Bombardier ultimately joined forces with Europe’s Airbus, which took a majority stake in the then-failing, narrow-body, medium-range C Series jets — for one dollar. One Canadian dollar. This was at the urging of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government — cabinet officials and others in the Liberal government (and civil service one wonders?) — who pushed Bombardier into that deal.
Big government, big corporations. Both bad.
Giant corporations, especially today, are vehemently left-wing in their outlook and political cash-giving, both here and in the U.S.A. Look at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and literally any Canadian company. They’re mostly led by left-wing suckups who will virtue-signal and embark on symbolic policies and projects appealing only to the trendy left-wing set, all day long.
Some people, especially those on the left, will nonetheless see this mess only as another example of capitalism gone wrong. And they’d be wrong. It’s exactly not that. It’s really an example of how big, and how all-encompassing, governments have become. The governments now virtually control business though license requirements and regulations and forcing so many hurdles that companies must cross — environmental, “social license,” student government input, indians, professional protesters, activist courts… — that government might just as well own them. It’s socialism by another name.
Governments have become so all-encompassing that they have virtually crowded-out the private sector. The private sector now only offers small projects in comparison to the truly lucrative — the ever-bigger mega-projects that governments now increasingly take on instead of leaving it to the private sector. They’ve created a dependency.
Running a business today means understanding that working with, and in complete cooperation (and maybe more!) with big government, is literally your lifeblood. It’s your job one now. Whole departments with scads of lawyers and lobbyists and government procurement experts and, apparently, ex Liberal politicians, now have to comprise a huge part of any corporate enterprise. It’s like another government department.
And just like some in big business, many in big government have no moral or ethical qualms whatsoever about shoveling out piles of other people’s cash for their own ends.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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