An Arrow through the heart of MacDonald Dettwiler

The National Post's Terence Corcoran gets this right; the Conservative government has simply caved in to rampant anti-Americanism and is trying to take advantage of the surge in breast-beating Canadian nationalism:

In what has now become a grandstand economic-policy performance over the $1.3-billion sale of Vancouver's MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates space division to a U.S. firm, the Harper Tories have embarked on a dangerous and potentially destructive exercise in economic nationalism. It's impossible to know what the strategy is at this point, although the signals are all pointing in one direction. Setting themselves up as more Liberal than the Liberals, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, have laid out a plan to use the open-ended Investment Canada Act to prevent Alliant Techsystems of Minnesota from completing the deal.

...at the time MDA signed on to develop its most valuable current product, the Radarsat-2 satellite imaging technology, MDA was owned by a U.S. company called Orbital Science [emphasis added--but no-one raised the Canadian roof then - MC], which won those rights in a competitive bidding process.

[...]

Sensationalists have claimed that if Ottawa lets Alliant buy the Radarsat-2 technology, it would be "the modern-day equivalent of the Avro Arrow," to use the words of Liberal MP Scott Bryson and Canada Research Chair, Professor Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia. But there is no parallel between Radarsat-2 and the Avro Arrow. The Arrow was killed by the government as a bad investment and written off, ending employment for thousands. Alliant plans to pay $1.3-billion to expand Radarsat work, especially by opening up the opportunity of selling products in the United States. It is paying $1.3-billion because it hopes to increase employement.

[...]

By preventing Alliant from buying the Radarsat property owned by MDA, the Harper government will be the one performing an Avro Arrow operation...Under the Harper plan, as it appears so far, the sales of products made and developed by MDA's operations in Vancouver will effectively be limited to one buyer, the Canadian government. Opportunities to sell into the likely most lucrative market, the United States, will be killed...

Defending arctic sovereignty gone mad. My views are here.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at April 13, 2008 06:29 PM