My thoughts exactly, which now begs the question of why?
Simple answer, Canada is a small country with a lot of protectionist tendencies. Either companies fail because they can't compete, or they get bought out because it's easy for American companies to throw money to buy Canadian companies because they are often small in scale and their is less cultural and geographical friction (vs. buying out a company in Europe)
Nortel
the company was already on the rocks when a tone of bad news came calling from High profile hacks due to poor IT security ranging from claimed ZTE to Wikileaks. Cooking the books and basically having the company sustained by bailout. CRRC that’s your answer. The Bombardier company has been in transition to the business jet arena now for a while.
Man, Nortel bugs the heck out of me. Even today in Canada, some newspaper will trot out some opinion piece by a former exec or some other troglodyte who claims Huawei/ZTE killed Nortel by hacking or IP theft while totally leaving out the cooking of the books which is what really made Nortel radioactive.
The. You have the Aviation side that bet on the wrong horse. They hoped that the C Series would come on as a hot new regional but it bombed. And not for the First time. Back when it started for Fockker it bombed there to. There had been a long back and forth between Airbus and Bombardier on the C series with Airbus early on undercutting their products to pull the rug out from Bombardier. To keep the company and C series alive they had to take bailouts and loans. This eventually came calling.
And now Airbus is taking the C series. And they are pushed out of commercial for Private jets.
These aren’t conspiracies these are poor management, inability to innovate or poor positioning to maintain market.
Back to the train side. They were also hampered by awful quality control. Recent deliveries to MTA, and Canadian transit operators were all hampered by quality issues. These aren't high tech pieces of equipment like C-Series, just basic trainsets. If you can't even get those right and on-time, what hope is there?