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BUSINESS REPORT: Once again, corporate welfare will end up costing taxpayers

A Bombardier CSeries aircraft is pictured during a news conference to announce a partnership between Airbus and Bombardier on the C Series aircraft programme, in Colomiers near Toulouse, France, October 17, 2017. Regis Duvignau /Reuters

If businesses can’t survive on their own, then the government has no right to get involved.

This was proven yet again with the failure of Bombardier’s C-Series jet to succeed.

Thanks to the “no-out-of-pocket-cost” deal by Airbus, the C-Series could now sell hundreds if not thousands of planes.

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However, Canadian taxpayers may never see a recoup of the $4.1-billion that the Quebec and the federal government doled out over the years to keep Quebec voters happy.

And with an Airbus plant in Alabama that operates at a fraction of the costs to produce aircraft in Quebec, the fallacy that jobs will stay in Canada in any meaningful way may just be a pipe dream.

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As The Globe’s and Mail’s Mark Milke so aptly puts it, “there’s one positive in all this: The Bombardier-Airbus deal finally rips away the pretence that corporate welfare is about domestic job creation.”

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