I have just read the section in the Bombardier AOM regarding stall recovery -this is the latest version available electronically, not the one I got nine years ago when I first did the conversion course.
Interestingly, the section on stall recovery, which runs to a grand total of one page, describes the training exercise in the words "recovery will take place at the operation of the stick shaker". There is still no mention of the full stall, ie holding the aircraft in the stick shake mode until the pusher activates. And to be fair, when we used to demonstrate this in the simulator, a lot of the time the only way we could get a stick push to actually happen was to instruct the PF to give a fairly hefty pull on the yoke, or the pusher wouldn't push (having done it for real in the aircraft on air tests that obviously isn't what really happens, but was the way the sims were modelled when I operated them, albeit a few years ago now). But teaching someone to pull back on the control column isn't very good as it instills exactly what you don't want. However, the Q400 is massively over powered at low level, like a jet - and to maintain 180kts level at 2300ft they would have about 30% torque set - so they should have been able to just firewall the power levers and pitch down a couple of degreees to recover when the shaker went off, and it would have just been a worrying incident.
As for the issue which was raised earlier about the F/O raising the gear without being asked - this is a stall recovery not a wind shear recovery, and possibly getting rid of the drag from the gear could have helped - so maybe she was actually doing something sensible - remember they were in uncharted territory as far as their training and the AOM was concerned.
The "pitch to the stick shaker" thing has been mentioned, but that actually isn't what is normally taught in the Q400, or emphatically wasn't when I used to instruct on it, and that wasn't something I made up. It works in a jet, because if you are unlucky enough to have a flame out at that high angle of attack the loss of lift isn't instant as the speed has to decay, so you can lower the nose a bit to hopefully keep control of the aircraft. However in the case of a turboprop if an engine fails the prop wash is providing a large amount of lift, and at the stick shake you are almost certainly below VMCA so if an engine flames out you have a more serious problem. It is interesting to demo in the simulator, but best done with the motion off. The wind shear recovery in the Q400 used to be "pitch to V2/Vga" and the checklist stated quite definitely not to pitch to the shaker, unless you were obviously going to
hit the terrain in which case you would do whatever you could, and take the chance that you didn't get windshear and a flame out at the same time. But holding it in the shaker for a stall recovery isn't the idea, you are supposed to be increasing the IAS by lowering the nose a bit.
Sadly it would appear that this wasn't practised by or demonstrated to these pilots in the simulator. However you cannot blame them for that. It isn't their fault that they were in the positions they were in when they were relatively inexperienced - that is the fault of the airline management, it's accountants, and to some extent the travelling public. I have flown with Captains with less experience than the captain here had, and with F/Os with far less experience than here, and have known of crews operating together with less total time than here. The big difference is total time on type - but having said that, my first flight as a captain on a dash 8 after line training was with an F/O who had been on the same sim course as I had, and we had less than a hundred hours on type between us, and when we did the conversion to the Q400 less than 50 hours between us - but considerably more total time. Maybe we were just lucky...