Budget watchdog to probe jet purchase

SUPER HORNETS

LEE BERTHIAUME Six years after ripping into the Conservative government’s cost estimates for F-35 stealth fighters, Parliament’s budgetary watchdog says it is digging into the “interim” Liberal plan to purchase Super Hornet jets.

The Liberal government announced last month it wants to buy 18 Super Hornets as a stopgap measure until a competition can be held in five years to find a replacement for the air force’s aging fleet of CF-18 fighter jets.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blasted the previous Conservative government for “botching” the replacement of Canada’s CF18s as he defended the plan to purchase Super Hornets before a “genuine, rigorous, open competition.”

“We wouldn’t have to be going through an interim supplying process if the previous government had actually been able to do the procurement job that they had been tasked with,” Trudeau said Monday during a year-end press conference.

“But they were unable to, and therefore we are doing an interim purchase of 18 Super Hornets while we prepare the deep and responsible open competition.”

The prime minister glossed over his own government’s role in creating a gap between the number of CF-18s ready to fly and how many the air force is required to have ready at any given time by quietly increasing the latter figure earlier this year.

Specifically, the Liberals recently changed a longstanding policy by ordering the air force to be ready to meet Canada’s commitments to North American defence and NATO concurrently, rather than managing them together.

The government says the previous policy represented a risk, but critics say the policy change and the decision to buy are part of a larger Liberal plan to avoid buying the controversial F-35 stealth fighter.

Ministers have admitted that they have an idea how much the Super Hornets will cost and that it will be more expensive in the long run for taxpayers, but they have refused to say by how much.

Experts and internal National Defence reports, including one that was recently removed from the department’s website, have warned that operating two different fighter jet fleets would be prohibitively expensive.

While the question of need when it comes to the Super Hornets remains in the air, parliamentary budget officer Jean-Denis Frechette is trying to answer the cost question.

On Dec. 8, Frechette sent a letter to National Defence’s top bureaucrat, John Forster,