Boeing’s investment for an aerospace center of expertise in the greater Montreal region is not worth the cost of the contracts that escaped Bombardier for new surveillance planes, believes the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet.
“Honestly, I’m not overexcited,” commented Mr. Blanchet on Tuesday about a Boeing investment worth $240 million in Quebec, announced the previous week and touted by the Trudeau government.
The famous American aircraft manufacturer must finance an aerospace development center called “Espace Aéro” and located partly in Longueuil, Mirabel and Montreal. The government of Quebec contributes 85 million, and various companies, including Pratt&Whitney, Airbus and Bombardier, inject for their part a total of 60 million.
The federal government touts these investments as the local industrial benefits of a no-bid contract awarded to Boeing last November for the purchase of 16 maritime patrol planes. By choosing Boeing’s P-8A Poseidon model, Ottawa thereby ruled out the modified version of the Aurora CP-140 aircraft proposed by Bombardier.
“I am not comfortable with all this since the moment we, under different pretexts, pushed aside Bombardier, […] of the surveillance aircraft contract, the benefits of which would have been in the order of five to ten billion,” the Bloc leader railed on Tuesday.
It presents the center of expertise announced as an entity dedicated to “a little bit of research with Boeing, without certainty of technology transfer, of integration into supply chains for large Quebec and Canadian companies”.
Yves-François Blanchet also criticized the geographical extent of the Aero Space, according to him scattered across “half of Quebec”. He still agreed that investing does not only have bad sides. “For the Longueuil sector, I imagine it’s good. »
Montreal stands out
The Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, on the contrary mentioned Boeing’s investment in the short list of main proofs that his government is able to attract “a record number” foreign investments.
“Montreal will be the only city in the world – you don’t see that in Seattle, you don’t see that in Toulouse – where you have both Bombardier, Boeing and Airbus,” he said during a briefing. press release, Tuesday morning.
Minister Champagne also mentioned investments by the Dow Chemical company in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, as well as those of the automobile manufacturer Honda, in Ontario, to demonstrate that his government won a “vote of confidence” from multinational companies in favor of Canada.
In 2017, Bombardier ceded control of its CSeries program to Airbus, in a context where the Trump government in the United States had just imposed tariffs of 300% on the import of these planes, following a complaint from Boeing. Quebec then castigated the “baseless” complaint from the American aircraft manufacturer.
More recently, in the summer of 2023, Quebec and Ontario came together to implore Ottawa to give Bombardier a chance to bid for the replacement of its end-of-life maritime surveillance aircraft. Without success.
When awarding the nearly $8 billion federal contract to Boeing, the federal government announced that the company was committed to investing the same amount in the aeronautical “ecosystem” in Canada, and to maintaining approximately 3,000 jobs.