As a rule of thumb, I’m against protectionism. (…)
But what happens when the company giving away the good stuff isn’t a company, but a foreign government? And what if the reason they’re giving it away in the short term is to put their Canadian private sector competitors out of business, as part of that foreign government’s foreign policy agenda?
That’s what the desert sheiks in the United Arab Emirates are trying to do to Air Canada. They want to dump an enormous amount of cheap flights into Canada, to take away Air Canada’s business to the middle east and Asia. It’s not business competition. It’s government to government competition.
