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Nationality is another human characteristic that is routinely assigned to corporations. In the legal sense, a firm’s nationality simply refers to the jurisdiction where it is registered, but this jus soli definition of corporate citizenship isn’t particularly useful. If the firm is publicly-owned, then it is as Canadian as Canadians want it to be, regardless of where it was registered. All that it takes for a company to be Canadian-owned is for enough Canadians to purchase its shares. And what are we to make of a company that is registered in one country, is majority-owned by the citizens of another, and conducts the bulk of its operations in a third?

Bombardier and Couche-Tard are described as being Quebec companies, but their ownership and activities largely reside outside the province. What people really mean is that these companies are controlled by Quebec families whose minority ownership positions are leveraged into majority control by the use of dual-class shares. In the case of Couche-Tard, the current dual-class system is set to expire with the retirement of the founders’ generation. Investors have been very well served by the current cohort of managers, but a proposal to extend the arrangement to the next generation is meeting some resistance.

There is a skeleton of a GM-style case to be made for bailing out Bombardier. Although governments should not be in the business of propping up individual firms, a sudden collapse of a company the size of Bombardier is something to be avoided. A bailout could then be justified as providing stability to the entire sector, and not just one company.