Liberals mull long-overdue military moves
Big moves are afoot on the federal military procurement file — and not a moment too soon.
Of the dizzying array of rusted-out Canadian Forces gear that must be replaced with varying degrees of urgency, two big-ticket items have dominated: new ships for the Royal Canadian Navy and Coast Guard, and new fighters for the Royal Canadian Air Force.
On both fronts, according to a senior defence industry source, the Liberal government is gearing up for moves it hopes will break the logjam. “They’re now where the former government was in June of 2015,” said the source. “Basically there’s a realization that what they’ve been doing isn’t working.” A procurement workforce that lost a huge amount of capacity during the 1990s grew only marginally during the 2000s, and was then hammered by Harper’s attempts to balance the books. At the same time, longstanding problems defining and communicating military requirements and costing projects persisted, and new, more onerous policies regarding investment planning and managing major projects were introduced, which meant that procuring military equipment took more time and effort.
On tap are an open, international competition for the new fighter jet, nominally including the controversial F-35 despite the Liberal campaign pledge to rule it out, and a re-apportioning of some of the furthest-off planned naval and Coast Guard shipbuilding, perhaps to a contractor or contractors overseas. Both moves are long overdue.
The selection and purchase of a jet to replace the 1980s-vintage Boeing CF-18s has been stalled since the former Conservative government’s sole-sourced purchase of 65 Lockheed-Martin F-35s went awry in late 2012, due to concerns over ballooning lifecycle costs, and the lack of an open competition. During last year’s federal campaign the Liberals pledged to scrap the F-35 deal once and for all, buy a less costly plane and re-apportion any savings to shipbuilding.
There was speculation last spring that a purchase of Boeing Super Hornets was in the offing, which quickly sputtered after the Liberals were accused by the opposition of seeking to engineer their own sole-sourced fighter purchase.
Meantime, at the Irving yard on the East Coast and Seaspan’s shipyard in Vancouver, work continues on a series of Arctic patrol boats and small Coast Guard vessels, respectively. Construction of a new fleet of naval frigates, two mammoth naval supply ships and a large three-season icebreaker for the Coast Guard is still some years off, given current building schedules.
In a recent interview, Jonathan Whitworth, Seaspan’s chief executive, said the first of four smaller vessels for the Coast Guard is on target to be completed next year, with two more coming in 2018.
He said he was unable to provide a schedule for completion of any further planned work by Seaspan, including the two supply ships and the three-season icebreaker, all much larger than anything the company has built to date. Whitworth referred questions about Seaspan’s longer-term federal work to a pending federal procurement review, which he said he expects to see by year-end.
In the early going of the Trudeau government indications were that, beyond finding a new fighter (anything other than the F-35 to fulfil its election promise) not much would change on the procurement front, particularly with respect to the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy unveiled by the Tories in the fall of 2011.
The waters were further muddied by the accession of Dominic LeBlanc, a member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s inner circle, to the post of Fisheries Minister, nominally responsible for the Coast Guard. LeBlanc, because of personal ties to the Irving family, has recused himself from dealings with federal shipbuilding. Industry insiders have expected the absence of an active minister’s hand on the Coast Guard rebuild would further slow decisionmaking.
But the cabinet defence procurement committee, chaired by Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr, has apparently come around to the view that the status quo will not stand. It may have been spurred in this by numerous reports, including one last week from the Commons defence committee chaired by Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr, raising alarms about the rapid buildup of Russian military power in the Arctic.
An open competition for the fighter jet procurement would necessarily include the F-35. But the statement of requirements, which likely will not be finalized until after the defence review currently under way is complete, may de facto preclude one plane, or several. The perennial likely competitors include Boeing’s Super Hornet, Dassault’s Rafale, The Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab’s Gripen, as well as the F-35.
The timing of any aircraft rollout will be of the essence: The 77 CF-18s now flying are being refurbished to extend their lives to 2025. But that date is a hard cap, because of life-cycle expiry of the air frames.
On the shipping side, the emerging thinking is that the current amorphous delivery timeline on the two supply ships and three-season icebreaker is too far off to be acceptable. Seaspan is deemed to have its hands full now with the four smaller Coast Guard vessels that are first in line to be built. A similar view was reached by senior figures in the former Conservative government, before it fell.
Should part or all of the supply-ship and large-icebreaker work go elsewhere, the Western shipyard would likely be given an additional round of contracts on smaller Coast Guard cutters, which also will need to be replaced in the medium term, the senior industry source suggested.