A landmark Quebec jet deal gives Carney a global win. Can it actually deliver?

On the stage at Airbus’s Mirabel facility north of Montreal, AirAsia’s charismatic chief executive, Tony Fernandes looked down at Prime Minister Mark Carney and then across the audience, and, in his British accent, made the relationship official.

“We’re officially married,” he said, reflecting on the deepening relationship between Canada and the low-cost airline he took over back in 2001. He just put in the largest single order for a Canadian-made commercial aircraft.

The 150 Airbus A220-300s ordered, which were once known as Bombardier’s C Series, can carry up to 160 passengers. According to officials, all 150 will be assembled at the Mirabel site by the nearly 5000 employees there. 

And the 62-year-old Malaysian entrepreneur, who went to boarding school in Surrey, England, was pushing Airbus representatives for more: to build a larger A220-500 variant capable of carrying up to 185 passengers.

“If they build it,” he said onstage, “we’ll buy another 150.”

“This is a US$19-billion deal,” Fernandes added,“which can grow to US$38 billion if we can have the large version.”

Back in 2018, Airbus rescued the program from Bombardier, and initially struggled financially with the aircraft’s development. Quebec invested about $1 billion to keep the project alive before Airbus took control. It later wrote off much of that investment.

Such is the magnitude and scope of Wednesday’s deal, it marks “a turning point for the Quebec aerospace industry,” as a whole, according to Carney in the speech he gave after Fernandes. He did not provide details on the extent of government involvement in the deal.

For Carney, however, who was joined Wednesday by Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, among other politicians, the deal between a European manufacturer and an Asian buyer all inside Canada falls right into his government’s geopolitical strategy: a push for global deals amid trade tensions with the U.S. under President Donald Trump.

Aerospace, Carney said — indeed with Quebec at the heart of it — remains one of Canada’s most strategically important industries. It is one, he added, that comes up constantly in meetings with foreign leaders and international partners.

Just last weekend, Carney travelled to Yerevan, Armenia, where he met European leaders while seeking to deepen Canada’s defence and trade ties with the European Union. He has also pursued expanded relations with India, Southeast Asia and China in an effort to reduce Canada’s overwhelming dependence on the U.S. market.

Though some analysts, while applauding the deal, expressed skepticism.

One being over how AirAsia has historically revised aircraft commitments. According to Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a consultancy focused on aerospace and defence in the United States, AirAsia has a “terrible track record” of following through on deliveries in recent years.

Between 2019 and 2026, the jet A330-900neo, which AirAsia planned to fly in roughly a 367-seat layout, went through three rounds of cuts. The A321XLR jet, meanwhile, configured in a 236-seat layout, saw orders trimmed by a third.

Then there is how quickly Airbus, within Quebec’s aerospace ecosystem, can deliver all the planes.

Fernandes told The Globe and Mail after the event that he expects the first deliveries to come in the first quarter of 2028.

John Gradek, an aviation expert and faculty lecturer at McGill University, told The Gazette that Airbus has invested heavily to expand the Mirabel facility, so could easily assemble more aircraft. The problem, he said, is whether suppliers can keep up.

“They need 14 a month,” Gradek said of Airbus’s production ambitions tied to the AirAsia deal. “At the moment, they are at seven.”

“The plant can do it. The bottleneck is the suppliers,” he said.

Many components for the A220 come from a sprawling network of manufacturers across Quebec and abroad, he explained. Those suppliers, Gradek argued, are still struggling with labour shortages, production delays and limited capacity.

“We’ve got underused capacity sitting idle because the supply chain isn’t able to fill the production lines,” he said.

Mélanie Lussier, chief executive of Aéro Montréal, pointed to a different problem in an interview with The Gazette.

“People, people, people,” Lussier said. “That’s the challenge.”

She said the industry will require roughly 65,000 additional workers over the next decade, she said on the industry as a whole.

Recent immigration restrictions in Quebec, she added, have already pushed some skilled aerospace workers out of the province. She pressed for more collaboration between all levels of government and sectors.

Still, she described the AirAsia agreement as a “major agreement,” showing the province’s global competitiveness.

As part of his speech on Wednesday, Carney vowed to expand Canada’s skilled workforce.

“We’re helping to transform and train our workforce,” he said, pointing to last week’s announcement of a $6-billion investment aimed at recruiting and training more than 100,000 skilled trades workers over the next five years.

It remains unclear how many of those workers will ultimately enter the aerospace industry.

Carney’s leadership on the global stage was something that Fernandes applauded, adding that was part of the reason why he wanted to come to Canada personally to support the mission.

Fernandes took over AirAsia in September 2001 after being inspired by easyJet in the United Kingdom. AirAsia has since grown into one of Asia’s largest airlines, with a fleet of more than 200 aircraft.

In 2017, Fernandes said an Airbus executive once discouraged him from buying what was then Bombardier’s struggling C Series program.

“I had been drinking all night in Montreal, turned up in Mirabel with a massive hangover, and the last thing I wanted to do was a test flight,” he said. “But I was blown away.”

This event was capped off in a different light: Fernandez was handed a Montreal Canadiens jersey.

Carney quipped that there’s “not much more important” than the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup run amid an ongoing trade dispute with the U.S.

“I look forward to calling the president of the United States and sending him his Habs jersey.”

Do you have a story tip? Write to me at hnorth@postmedia.com

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