When Bombardier launched its first Ski-Doo snowmobile in 1959, it was initially targeted at trappers, prospectors and anyone else isolated by snow and ice. But the bright-yellow machines soon became a hot toy for affluent sports enthusiasts across North America and Europe, and by the time the company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange a decade later, Ski-Doo sales were exploding. Bombardier’s revenues in 1970 came in at nearly $1 billion, when measured in today’s dollars, up a whopping 60 per cent in just one year.

So you can forgive Bombardier’s president, Laurent Beaudoin, for his swagger in the company’s first annual report that year. Bombardier “has proved itself to be one of the most important industrial and commercial organizations in Canada,” he crowed, while the report said the snowmobile industry was “riding the crest of the leisure market [and] the wave shows no sign of cresting . . . All forecasts point to a positive and continuing upsweep of the trend well into the 21st century.”

Instead, within three years Bombardier was in serious trouble, caught out by the 1970s oil crisis and a glut of snowmobiles on the market from more than 100 rival companies, which caused its revenues to plunge.