Features Procedures Safety & Training
Aerospace Policy

The debate over government subsidies and whether Canada needs a
national aerospace industry has heated up again, sparked on the
fixedwing side by the sudden resignation of Bombardier CEO Paul Tellier
in December, and word that the federal government is considering a $1-
billion package for the sector.

On
one side is the aerospace industry, which has made a case for a
national strategy, arguing that aerospace is one of the four industry
sectors that drive the Canadian economy. It is a $20-billion industry
that directly employs 75,000 Canadians in more than 400 companies
throughout the country. So it’s not just Bombardier. Major players in
the helicopter sector include Bell Helicopter Textron Canada,
Eurocopter Canada and Pratt & Whitney Canada, which manufactures
engines for both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

“The bottom line is if we don’t have a national aerospace strategy, we are going to be losers on the world stage.

And
it’s not just the established players Canada is competing against,
warned Peter Boag, president of the Aerospace Industries Association of
Canada (AIAC). “China, India, Korea and Japan are all building a
national aerospace capability. If you want to play in this game, you
need a national strategy with government and industry that lays out
where the industry is going and roles of the players in it.”

On
the other side are the free-market supporters who say no industry or
company should be given a guaranteed right to survival, and that the
concept of government industrial policy is antiquated and void of a
sound economic foundation. There is no shortage of targets including
government support to Bombardier to goose political fortunes in Quebec,
grants by Technology Partnerships Canada and support from the
less-than-transparent Export Development Corporation.

Jason
Clemens, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal
policy, said that government assistance to the industry is just another
example of market intervention and picking corporate and industry
winners. “When companies and industries start depending on guarantees
they become less competitive.”

Cordiano disagrees. “We don’t
have to go down an old path. Just because it was like that in the past
doesn’t mean it has to be like that this time. If we don’t have a
strategy the fallout will be dramatic – not just because of the 21,000
highly skilled, high-paying jobs here in Ontario, but because of
innovation in our [national] economy.”

The AIAC noted that
aerospace is a strategic industry that operates with a consistent trade
surplus and pays back wide economic and social benefits to Canadians.
“Past Canadian aerospace successes,” Boag said, “have not been an
accident but the product of an effective industry-government
partnership.”

He predicted that Canada’s aerospace industry would disappear in a decade without government assistance.

Douglas
Reid, a business strategy professor at Queen’s University, wonders if
that would be such a bad thing. “Every nation has its set of irrational
beliefs, and in Canada those beliefs are that aerospace is a strategic
industry,” he said. “Maybe we should ask ourselves if there is
something else that would provide equal or more benefit for the money.
There are lots of countries that do very well without an aerospace
industry.”

Federal Industry Minister David Emerson disagrees,
going on the public record as saying the government won’t abandon the
industry.