What was the death knell for Bombardier Transportation (BT), the rail division of Bombardier Inc.?

Was it the 2017 decision by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to disqualify BT from even bidding on a landmark contract for as many as 1,800 rail cars? Was it the 2017 decisions in Bombardier’s home Canadian market by the transit systems of Montreal and Toronto to order their next-gen rail cars from China Railway Rolling Stock Corp. (CRRC) and France’s Alstom SA, respectively?

Or, finally, was it the decision announced last week by Via Rail, yet another firm in Bombardier’s home country, to award a $1-billion (Cdn) contract for railcars to Germany’s Siemens AG?

There have been many such setbacks at BT.

Always, BT’s record of unreliability in delivering glitch-free products on time is why it loses contracts. And each setback also costs BT lucrative after-sales service contracts.

You could say that it’s time for Bombardier to shed its arrogant incompetence (problems with faulty BT equipment are usually the buyer’s fault, in BT’s view), now that archrivals Siemens and Alstom are merging, with combined global market share more than twice that of BT’s approximately 4 per cent.

And BT has no realistic hope of holding off Chinese state-owned industry leader CRRC (13 per cent market share), a growing threat to BT in North America, where it already has planted its flag in Montreal, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.

You could say that.

But, as a still-bloated General Motors Co. has shown us in waking up one morning with the realization it needed to shutter seven North American plants including GM Oshawa, entrenched cultures of arrogant complacency that are decades in the making usually end only with liquidation.

Canada’s resilient banks

Two warnings last week of economic turbulence ahead should be assessed in a larger, favourable context.

The federal banking regulator last week ordered Canadian banks to tighten their lending standards, ahead of a possible economic slowdown in 2019 and a resulting rise in loan losses. And Citigroup Inc. warned of a possible “debt crisis” for Canada and, indeed, the world, over the next three years.

Consider, though, that three years is a long time, and that at least some of the troubles currently besetting the world are temporary. To wit, trade wars, Brexit, slumping commodity prices, the easing in China’s once-torrid GDP growth rate, and geopolitical instability ranging from Russian adventurism to severe economic distress in major economies such as Brazil.

But the trade wars will abate, since there are only losers on all sides. Europe’s economic crisis is waning. Brexit will resolve itself, perhaps not in ideal fashion but with the crippling uncertainly removed. Lower oil prices benefit emerging economies. China’s GDP is poised for a modest uptick, and Japan has just recorded its second-longest postwar stretch of GDP growth uninterrupted by recession. Add in continued U.S. buoyancy, and the world’s three biggest economies are robust.

Canada’s Big Six banks have bolstered their reserves to withstand above-average loan losses. Should those occur, the “contagion” we’re warned of – a jump in Alberta loan losses spreading elsewhere – is unlikely. For instance, Quebec’s much larger economy is posting unusually strong growth.

Preparing for the worst is wise. But there is such a thing as the Cassandra who has predicted seven of the last two downturns. This probably isn’t a time to go long on pessimism.

Making the internet safe

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, in 1990, is waging a campaign to enable us to be online “freely, safely and without fear.”

So far, more than 50 organizations have signed up for his mission to create a “Magna Carta for the web,” rules of proper conduct devised by governments, business and individuals, who then adhere to them.

Ahead of the Magna Carta’s scheduled publication May 2019, you can monitor its development at Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation .

Among the early signatories to the Magna Carta project are Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. It only makes sense that these two firms, which dominate what was intended to be a public commons, be at the table.

Then again, the business model for Facebook and Google is the harvesting of intimate data of billions of people for sale to parties unknown, for use as they see fit. As such, they are prime candidates for transformation into non-profit utilities.

Berners-Lee is confident that the likes of Facebook and Google feel a moral obligation to clean up their vast ecosystems. “People in the big companies are concerned about truth and democracy,” he has told the U.K. Guardian.

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That is a strikingly naïve proposition.

Fact is, civility and the profit motive don’t easily mix, not online, in medicine, and many other realms.

But if Berners-Lee can galvanize the forces required to clean up the Web, he will be owed a second debt of gratitude. Gordon Brown, the former U.K. prime minister and an early signatory to the Magna Carta, has put it well: “Tim Berners-Lee has pinpointed one of the great human rights issues of our time.”

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