The Company that Broke Canada

Part 2 is out now! https://youtu.be/sDdC3-LT7pM?si=q8JTXXnRo0iq31FA

Time to watch a documentary on a company that I've never heard of, committing a crime I've never heard of. Thanks bobby.

"We make... fucking money." That is such an amazing line to end this video on. The lack of swears up until that point and not expecting it from you make it so much more impactful.

I worked for Nortel in Ottawa for many years until the downfall caught up to me in 2003 and I lost everything. Your video brought tears to my eyes as I relived all of those events you describe, and all of the great times while there. It is still so hard to believe that such a great great company was reduced to nothing and so many people suffered because of it. Looking forward to Part 2.

I feel that the captions on this are going to be massively underrated. The dial tone alone puts this above and beyond nearly everything else on the platform. Add to that the use of colours and placement on the arguments makes this an incredibly clear video.

The style of BobbyBroccoli documentaries is just perfect...the maps, the calendars, the voice-over...just amazing

Learned of this company when a scholarship with their name on it went to me when I went to university to study engineering. Thanks, Nortel, the money went into gambling almost immediately.

This was phenomenal. This might as well have been a Netflix special, it was that high quality.

I worked for BNR/Nortel starting in the early 90's and it really was an awesome place to work. Our division was sold off around 2001 and although we were pretty bitter about it, thinking we got the shaft and that Nortel would rebound, but being sold off was the best thing that happened to my career and pension. There is so much history in this video that I was completely unaware of, even though I worked for the company. Thank-You.

"BNR was respected, sure, but Bell Labs had six Nobel Prizes, and their latest hotshot physicist was bound to win them another." Surely this physicist's miraculous work with organic transistors is totally above board. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

I was at university studying in civil engineering while Nortel fell... Half of the electric engineering department lost their internships in one day, it was a total panic - some had to finish their "intership" as janitors at the university in order to get their credits...

He just gave a almost complete Canadian history condensed into one company. Bravo sir.

I am in IT. In 2003 my company built a new HQ in Detroit. I was the one who benchmarked all the enterprise ethernet gear. I learned a lot about the various players but found the people working for Nortel and the tech features and management software to be clearly the best and so we went with the 8600 ethernet chassis switches. I think we ended up with 34 of them. The guys doing the phones also selected Nortel. It was great to actually have a single vendor for all of our comm gear. We came from a mixed environment. It was sad for me to see Nortel fall. RIP

My mother worked for Nortel for many years in the U.S. After she retired was when the company fell apart and they tried to stiff their retirees on their medical benefits. Fortunately they got together as a group and took Nortel to court over it and managed to get a decent settlement. At least she had her retirement money in her 401k and Social Security.

I worked at Nortel, and I recall the email from John Roth gloating about how Cisco missed its earnings numbers. He how this wouldn't happen at Nortel as we made a much more diverse business. Two weeks later, Nortel missed its earnings numbers. Wished I'd saved the email...

Nortel was a beast. To this day their PBX's are still running in a lot of offices. If you're in the telecom industry today, you either work with or have worked with min 1 former nortel employee. If you have a large enough family from the Ottawa region, you're almost guaranteed to have a relative somewhere that worked for them.

My Dad was a manager at Nortel for years and we were almost ruined when the company crashed. I am pretty sure my dad had stock options and most of our wealth was in that stock.

As a Canadian gen Z, it’s amazing that absolutely none of this made it into any social studies class even though all of this happened at the very same time as every other event in Canadian history and had such a big effect on all of it, from the time of John A. MacDonald to the last few decades

My neighbour had 5000 shares of Nortel when it was worth over $120 a share! He worked at Nortel for decades as a salesman. He stubbornly would not sell the shares even when the writing was on the wall. By the time the bottom fell out of Nortel his shares were worth 60 cents each.

This is very, very well done. As a former Northern Telecom employee, thanks so much for creating this documentary. I left in the early '90s but kept in touch with my co-workers and it was sad to see Nortel implode like it did.