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Fifteen or so years ago, Canadian companies were in the world's vanguard of cars, nuclear power, forestry and high technology. Today, they are no longer.

It used to be that Canadian auto plants ranked among the most productive in North America. That record, coupled with government-financed health care and a low dollar, gave our plants an enviable record and helped the country punch above its manufacturing weight in making cars.

Today, the entire North American industry is in crisis, with General Motors and Chrysler lining up for government help, plants closing and the future as uncertain as the past. Very unpopular bailouts for both companies were deemed inescapable by the Harper and Obama governments. Already, the GM bailout is being used as a yardstick by which industries, provinces and even premiers measure their demands for federal help.

It used to be, too, that Canadian forest-products companies were among the world leaders. Today, they are world leaders in losing money. Scandinavian companies, it would appear, have surpassed them technologically.

(The Canadian mining sector is doing much better but, with a few exceptions, has been gobbled up by foreigners. And it's one sector where Canada should be a major world player, but we've lost too many companies to takeovers for that to happen.)

Research In Motion is a brilliant success. There are few others in high technology, alas, at least in terms of creating world-class companies.

Fifteen years ago, Nortel Networks employed 29,000 people. It was the country's high-tech leader, known here and abroad. It did more research than any company in Canada. It spawned feeder companies. There were other high-tech powerhouses, such as JDS Uniphase and Newbridge Networks. Today, many of these companies have been demolished, broken up or taken over. Even Cognos, a wonderful Canadian success story based in Ottawa, succumbed to an IBM takeover.

Fifteen years ago, Atomic Energy of Canada had its heavy-water reactors operating in Ontario and sold them in scattered countries. But AECL hasn't sold one in quite a while. Its newly designed reactor is totally unproven. The fiasco with its Maple reactor for making isotopes, eight years late and over budget, has damaged its reputation internationally.

Maybe AECL can recover some of its past eminence. Maybe Saskatchewan, with all that uranium, can build an industry. But a takeover by, or merger with, a foreign firm is more likely AECL's eventual fate.

The decline and/or fall of these major industries are partly explained by reasons tied to particular companies. Each industry had its unique challenges. And, of course, the current recession is hammering every industry, except bankruptcy lawyers.

In many instances, however, there was very poor management and an inability to correctly sense where technologies, markets and customer preferences were heading. It's easy to bash auto unions for contracts that could not be sustained, given the increasingly precarious state of GM and Chrysler.

But the overall decline and/or fall of these industries had much more to do with management shortcomings than labour intransigence. Indeed, the decline and/or fall cost tens of thousands of well-paying blue-collar jobs, and tens of thousands of extremely well-paying white-collar jobs.

It's also hard to blame the private-sector plutocrats' favourite whipping boy - big government - for what befell these industries.

Government policy didn't push Nortel or GM over the cliff. Governments have been astoundingly generous to AECL, even when its performance did not justify the munificence.

A recent report from the Council of Canadian Academies recently highlighted the weak innovation record of Canadian companies as one key reason for productivity and competitiveness problems. They might have added a less-than-stellar record of company management, too.

The high priests of Canadian industry are a very self-congratulatory lot. And in some cases, the self-praise is warranted. There are some very impressive world-class Canadian companies, perhaps the best of them being Quebec-based SNC-Lavalin.

But there are also strains in corporate Canada of management making a killing by selling companies to foreigners and being far too timid cocooned inside North America, tied to a United States in relative, long-term decline.