Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon would like the Trudeau government to follow suit and also reinvest in the Airbus A220 line of aircraft.
In February, Quebec returned $380 million to the program, adding to the $1.3 billion invested in 2016 by the Couillard government in what was then Bombardier’s C Series.
Mr. Fitzgibbon took advantage of his presence at the Davos economic summit last week to discuss this issue with Federal Minister of Industry François-Philippe Champagne.
“We talked about different industrial sectors, but aeronautics is a sector that we should do jointly if we want Quebec to stand out. Ontario makes cars, we made planes, so why not work with the feds? And we want to work with the feds,” the minister said earlier this week.
According to a recent Journal compilation, the Trudeau government has paid at least $1.4 billion to Ontario’s auto industry since 2018, more than double the $660 million it spent on Quebec’s aerospace industry during the same period.
“We need help”
“Airbus will have the A220-500 [stretched version of the A220], Bombardier will surely do something else… I think we will ask the federal government to help us. We will remain sovereign in the sense that Quebec is very present in this sector. We will continue to be, but we need help with major projects,” added Pierre Fitzgibbon.
The new president of Airbus Canada, Benoît Schultz, confirmed to the Journal the holding of talks with Ottawa on a possible investment in the A220, but he was circumspect.
“We have an ongoing discussion, so it’s hard to say more,” he said.
Mr. Fitzgibbon repeated this week that in his opinion, “the C Series there would still be Quebecois if the feds had boarded with us at the time”.
Ottawa still invested $350 million in the C Series in 2005 and $124 million in 2017.
Recall that Bombardier ceded control of the C Series to Airbus in 2018 for $1.
An extraordinary challenge
The recently announced reinvestment in the A220 (900 million US dollars from Airbus and 300 million US dollars from Quebec) will be used to finance the increase in the production rate of the aircraft, which is to increase from 6 to 14 aircraft per month.
“It’s a big challenge that hasn’t been done many times in aeronautics […] and so Airbus is putting all its strength into making it happen,” Schultz said.
This increase should increase the number of Airbus employees in Mirabel from 2,500 to more than 3,000.
