Regardless of the reasons for acquiring both, when many of us were invited to YUL in 2003 to "test drive" several different aircraft the opinions were near unanimous: the CRJ was almost universally despised and the ERJ was almost universally praised as the "winner by a landslide" of the four planes on display (A318, B717, ERJ, CRJ.)

(Now infrequent FT poster cattle and I got a fair bit of airtime on CTV news that evening, as we waxed poetic about how great the plane was, contrary to our initial expectations. That led to some unexpected complications for cattle, as he had booked the day off "sick." But we sat next to each other in the econo section for so long, both AC and Embrarer people came along to chase us out.)

The CRJ was utterly hated. I remember one FTer claiming he wanted to kick the Bombardier rep "in the balls" everytime he opened his mouth. The rep spent most of his time making excuses for problems, stupid design issues (i.e. overhead air vents), and other issues with the CRJ.

Amusingly enough Airbus, with their 50% heavier than everyone else A318 handed out the smallest model planes, while Bombardier and their "Barbie Plane" handed out the very largest.

(Many of us who rode the B717 were amused by the Airbus rep's repeated claims that the B717 was actually an outdated and woefully underpowered DC-9, as take-off felt more like this.)