Feds mum on cost of Super Hornets

National Defence has a good idea of what it will cost to buy and operate 18 Super Hornets on an interim basis and has even set aside money to make the purchase — it just won’t say what that number is.

Questions about the cost of the fighter jets have figured prominently since the Trudeau government announced its intention to buy the planes as a stopgap last November.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, National Defence’s chief financial officer, Claude Rochette said his staff were ordered to come up with a cost estimate for the Super Hornets at that time.

The exercise ran in parallel with the much larger effort to cost out the Liberals’ new defence policy and included help from a team of experts from accounting firm Deloitte.

“The government asked us to look at options, but in particular Super Hornets,” Rochette said.

“That (Deloitte) team came from the U.S. and they (had) worked directly with Boeing. So they had access to information, and they had done costing before.”

Officials determined the price to not only purchase and fly the planes, Rochette said, “we have also taken into account the disposal, what would be the residual value of the jets. So we have all that.”

But there was hardly any mention of the interim fighter jets in the defence policy, which was unveiled in June and promised an extra $62 billion for the Canadian military over the next 20 years.

Most of what was written about fighter jets instead focused on an eventual competition to replace Canada’s existing CF-18s with 88 new planes, at a cost of between $16 billion and $20 billion.

The policy also revealed the cost of many other planned military procurement projects, including estimates that replacing the navy’s 12 destroyers and three destroyers will cost up to $60 billion.

What little was written about interim fighter jets did not include a dollar figure.

Rochette insisted the policy does include money for interim fighters, but he wouldn’t reveal how much, because the government has not actually decided to move ahead with the planned purchase.

That decision is expected to hinge on the results later this month of a trade dispute between U.S. aerospace firm Boeing, which makes the Super Hornets, and Canadian rival Bombardier.

The U.S. Commerce Department on Sept. 25 will present the results of its investigation into whether Bombardier sold its CSeries passenger jets at an unfairly low price with help from federal subsidies.

An adverse finding could result in fines or tariffs being imposed on Bombardier, but could also prompt the Liberals, which have criticized the investigation, to walk away from interim Super Hornets.

In the meantime, the government has said all options are on the table.

“The issue is: Are you going with 18 Super Hornets or are you going with no new planes but you spend millions and millions of dollars to upgrade the current planes?” Rochette said.

“Are you looking at buying used fighter jets as an interim? That could be done, too. So we don’t even know at this point what it could be.”

Some public estimates have pegged the figure at around $2 billion just to buy the planes, and several more billion to maintain and operate them, but Rochette would not confirm those numbers.

The Trudeau government announced in November its plan to purchase the planes to temporarily fill a critical shortage of fighter jets until a full competition can be run to replace the aging CF18s.