As a green young Tokyo trade diplomat, I was peripherally involved in the efforts by Bombardier to sell its executive jets to the Japan Self-Defense Forces. The Canadian bid won on performance, specs, price and operational testing. Greenies like me were ready to celebrate. More seasoned veterans of this murky world said, “Not so fast … .”

A day or two after the closing date the Canadian Embassy got a call from a high-level contact in the Japanese government reporting that the contract would be going to Boeing. We all gasped and bellowed the equivalent of “WTF! This is outrageous! We won, fair and square.” The Japanese caller said mildly, “The White House called. What did you expect us to do….?”

Civilian aircraft sales, like their close cousins, defence aircraft, are opaque and unsavoury as it possible to imagine. To say they are always subject to political pressure is to trivialize the reality. The big ones are always only about politics and national interests and everyone involved knows it. National interest trumps price, quality, and qualification. Claims of what was paid, what was received, denials of the side deals that sealed the sale, should be treated as less credible than a 5 a.m. Donald Trump tweet.

Complaints about subsidies perennially fly back and forth keeping trade lawyers rich and affecting nothing.As Warren Buffett, commenting on the fact that the aircraft and airline businesses destroy investors’ capital always, wryly observed that any true defender of liberal market capitalism would have shot the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Aircraft manufacturing is a mixture of technology, craft, alchemy and good luck. Budgets and deadlines are merely fictions to submit to funding taxpayers and investors, while their authors suppress their snickers at their inventive deceits.

This means you need to be very large to sustain the sinkhole of money that bringing a new airplane on-stream necessarily requires. Boeing, three decades ago, had two American civilian aircraft competitors. Now it has none. Savvy Eurocrats, in the 1960s realized they could only afford a single European entrant, so they cobbled one together out of a variety of national competitors and jumbo jets’ worth of European taxpayers’ cash. Boeing was not amused.

They managed to keep this arriviste out of North America for 15 years, waging a brutal war against Airbus legally, politically and reportedly with the use of severe commercial threats to any existing Boeing customers, who might be tempted by the Europeans very snazzy new A320, and its heavily subsidized pricing. It worked.

Until one day a swaggering Albertan bush pilot named Max Ward decided to roll the dice, and challenge the Canadian airline oligopoly. Wardair stumped up for 14 of the Airbus planes. Boeing went ballistic, employing the U.S. Embassy, the White House and “inducements” to block the sale. They failed. Sadly, so did Wardair. It was a very classy little airline for a while. And soon Air Canada and American carriers were buying the upstart’s European’s planes.

Yes, the recent Bombardier CSeries deal with Airbus is potentially bad for Quebec and Northern Ireland’s long term aerospace future. Yes, it is a travesty that British, Canadian and Quebec taxpayers will likely lose most of their “investment,” in years to come. And yes, it is a breach of every fair-trade norm, we are pledged to live by. But it has saved Bombardier for at least a decade or maybe two. It has also saved tens of thousands of highly paid Canadian jobs.

In the seamy world or aircraft sales and manufacturing that is about as good as you will ever get, so get over it.

One final delicious irony is that Trudeau père was very keen on building a “third way” for Canada to build economic partnerships outside North America. He worked hard to develop an EU option for Canadians. Airbus was whispered about as a good possible partner.

In politics timing is all, and he was a generation too early. It has fallen to his son to help a key Canadian manufacturing sector make a sharp pivot to the EU. It is probably the first of many as the CETA agreement begins to impact investment decision-making, and Trumpian dystopia causes Canadian business to seek European and Asian alternatives.

And for that we have to say thank you to Boeing and its classic application of brass knuckles and bovver boots. This time it blew up on them very badly. How likely is it that Canada will now buy any fighter jets from Boeing, or for that matter much of anything, one may also wonder …

Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, was an NDP strategist for 20 years.

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