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But beyond that, it’s baffling — like a pantomime from a bygone era.

This is Bombardier we’re talking about. No one blames the company’s rank-and-file employees for its most-reviled status, but we are well beyond the point the rank and file should expect anything more than sympathy from Canadian taxpayers — and GTA taxpayers in particular. Traditionally, they might have accepted they were overpaying for rolling stock out of a dubious obligation to workers 600 miles and a 15-hour drive away, but at least they got the rolling stock. In recent years Bombardier has famously forgotten how to fulfil this most basic part of the bargain, and has focused its efforts instead on its real strength: Inhaling government money and enriching senior management.

Toronto’s Bombardier streetcar order is a museum of missed deadlines and shoddy workmanship. Light rail cars for Waterloo’s new line and prototype vehicles for the Eglinton Crosstown line in Toronto have suffered similar delays — even more baffling, as these are essentially off-the-shelf designs in use around the world. In January, NYC Transit president Andy Byford warned the company that it was not making a case for “new orders very favourable,” after a previous batch of subway cars arrived both very shoddy and very late.Quebec’s Caisse de dépot owns one third of Bombardier, for heaven’s sake, and even it gave a $1 billion rolling stock contract for Montreal’s new light rail network to SNC-Lavalin and Alstom. Ottawa’s light rail cars are Alstom as well. VIA Rail’s new cars — VIA Rail’s! — are coming from Siemens, not from Bombardier.

It must say something about the power of received wisdom in Canadian politics that government ministers still think people want to hear how they’re going to help out poor Bombardier. At this point in the company’s decline they would be crazy even to let the company bid on their historic transit expansion plans, lest they become historic transit debacles.