Putting taxpayer money into the Bombardier C-Series program is a bad idea, Parti Quebecois leader Pierre Karl Peladeau said Monday after meeting with Bombardier CEO Alain Bellemare.

Peladeau spent 90 minutes speaking with the aerospace company’s top brass, and said while he believes the company deserves to be supported, he doesn’t back the recent $1 billion investment by the Quebec government.

“The transaction that was signed between the premier and Bombardier is not a good transaction for the taxpayers of Quebec,” he said.

The deal would make the government a partner in the C-Series program, but Peladeau believes, if anything, Quebec should have invested in the entire company. He said thatwould have given the province a stake in the rail division, business jets and other properties.

“We need to protect the money Quebecers are investing in the company, and in the parent company, obviously, it would be a significant position,” he said.

Peladeau's latest criticismcomes days after Francois Legault also met with Bombardier brass.

Both lament Quebec's deal comes with no guarantees Bombardier will maintain staffing levels.

Bombardier asked to meet with the two opposition leadersin the hopes of stopping all the negative talk about the government bailing out Bombardier.

“Our competition loves taking this to our customers and showing it to our customers and saying, ‘Oh look, would you buy a plane from this company? They're going to fail tomorrow,’” said John Paul MacDonald, V.P. of public affairs at Bombardier. 

Bombardier has long argued that every country with an aerospace industry provides generous government aid,

but Mathieu Bedard of the Montreal Economic Institute believes Canada is too small to support its struggling plane maker.

“The U.S. has a 350-million-taxpayer economy; there are how many millions in Brazil? A couple billion in China. With our 35 million taxpayers in Canada, we simply don’t have the finances to be playing that game,” said Bedard.

It would seem giving billions to Bombardier has become a political hot potato.

No one wants to risk the jobs of Bombardier's 15,000 Quebec employees, which is why even as Peladeau criticizes the way the Couillard government helped Bombardier,he also said he wants to see Ottawa help out the company.

“Every year Quebecers send $50 billion to Ottawa, and we have to demand they use it to protect Quebec jobs,” he said.