Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:02 on 2019-02-14 Permalink Reply  

• Chris 10:57 on 2019-02-14 Permalink

  Wait, isn’t Quebec part of Canada? 🙂

• Kate 11:02 on 2019-02-14 Permalink

  Well, let’s say, why the Quebec and Canadian establishments see it differently.

• Patrick 13:23 on 2019-02-14 Permalink

  Paul Wells has a wonderfully snarky column this week on the avalanche of commentators who defend the kid-gloves approach to big companies like SNC. But he sees it as a Canadian problem, not just a Quebec one.
  https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/canada-the-show/

• Ian 20:32 on 2019-02-14 Permalink

  It’s a subtle distinction but this is one instance where federal/ Quebec or Quebec/ROC is a useful description… But let’s not devolve into a self-policing precise definition community. We all knew what Kate meant by that. she was hardly dogwhistling.
  Of course Quebec wants SNC Lavalin to succeed, like Bombardier and others. Realistically when companies shift multinationally we risk things like Pascals getting bought out then collapsing because the parent company had issues. Pascal was way better than Rona, better positioned, then whoops dead.

• Chris 21:30 on 2019-02-14 Permalink

  Ian, hence my smiley! 🙂

• david100 01:42 on 2019-02-15 Permalink

  Yeah, I have friends who work at SNC-Lavalin, and any sort of project that tanks Quebec’s super firm in a permanent way is not cool in my book. Obviously, Toronto types are trying to steal more work from Montreal, and it should be seen that way, regardless of what we all know about how it works in Montreal.

  That said, there have been discussions on this blog even about about how there’s a real question about whether certain institutional norms have made it so that Quebec simply doesn’t have the engineering know how that it once did. Ie. in a context where the best leave to Canada or the US, that perhaps the ones hired onto local firms are funneled into a system the de-emphasizes good work in favor of patronage/tricked contracts which, in turn, leaves Quebec sort of with an inferior class of engineers and project managers.

  Personally, I think that SNC-Lavalin employs some of the best engineers in the entire world. But anyone who saw how the new McGill hospital went down could be forgiven for having that Charles Bronson feeling of loading the pistol and walking out into the rainy midnight to settle score.

  So, basically, I think Kate is completely right. In Canada, this is a Quebec problem. In Quebec, this is a Liberal problem, with maybe a weak-willed PQ in the face of Stephen Harper footing the bill situation. And the question of whether they do bribes in other countries? Like Bombardier, who cares if it means Quebec jobs?

• david100 01:46 on 2019-02-15 Permalink

  Bah, should have re-read that before posting, but the point is there.

  Would only add that it’s a real shame that our bidding system is so vulnerable to these scams.

• Jack 05:46 on 2019-02-15 Permalink

  From Well’s, boy this really is a Quebec inc. problem.” And it’s true that SNC-Lavalin’s largest shareholder is the Quebec public-service pension fund, whose pet project is a light-rail network, whose main construction contractor is SNC-Lavalin. And it’s true that the head of the pension fund pushed hard for the federal government to set up an Infrastructure Bank whose only investment to date, announced on the day before a beleaguered provincial government launched an election campaign, was in the light-rail network promoted by the pension fund that is SNC’s biggest investor and which, in turn, is the rail project’s biggest contractor.”

• Kevin 08:30 on 2019-02-15 Permalink

  If SNC-Lavalin is no longer allowed to compete, employees will quit and form their own, smaller firms.

  It’s been done before, and it’s how SNC-Lavalin acquired key divisions.

  For example, its mining division was acquired by purchasing a mining firm that had been created by people laid off from another company.

• Chris 15:35 on 2019-02-15 Permalink

  Along the same line as Kevin: people often make the mistake of thinking that if a company goes bankrupt that all value is lost. But the workers don’t vanish, the factories don’t vanish, the inventory doesn’t disappear. Something new can rise from the ashes.