Botched procurement under fire again
Search-and-rescue aircraft delay compared to ongoing F-35 woes
OTTAWA — Comparisons are being made between efforts to buy new search-and-rescue airplanes and the controversial F-35 project even as the Conservative government sunk another $36 million into the troubled stealth fighter’s development Wednesday.
At issue are concerns a Defence Department fixation on one type of aircraft combined with a lack of political oversight is to blame for a decadelong delay in replacing the Air Force’s aging Buffalo and Hercules search-and-rescue planes.
“There’s a parallel with the F-35s in the (military’s) desire to have the most cutting-edge aircraft,” said Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. “It’s DND’s fault that they messed up this procurement.”
Auditor General Michael Ferguson warned in a report this week that the federal government’s search-and-rescue capabilities are in danger of crumbling, in part because its six Buffalo and 13 Hercules airplanes are on their last wings.
In 2002, efforts to replace the Buffalos — first purchased in 1967 — and the Hercules were launched, with money set aside in 2004 in anticipation of the first new plane being delivered in 12 to 18 months.
But as with the F-35, the Defence Department was accused of rigging requirements for the new search-andrescue airplane so one specific aircraft, the Italian C-27J Spartan, would win.
The military denied it rigged the process, but a National Research Council report published in March 2010 backed up the allegation and called for the requirements to be rewritten.
The project was subsequently taken out of National Defence’s hands and given to Public Works — as has happened with the F-35.
Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose’s office has promised a “competitive, fair, open and transparent” procurement process, with plenty of industry input and other safeguards to ensure “the best search and rescue capability — and the best benefit for Canadian taxpayers.”
But new search-and-rescue airplanes aren’t expected until at least 2017, which the auditor general has warned is two years after the Buffalos’ engines are expected to fail.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay has complained about unending bureaucracy and hurdles, alluding to Public Works when he said in March that he had “no small degree of frustration that we have not been able to move this project forward.”
“What I can tell you is that we are pushing very hard to have this procurement proceed,” MacKay said at the time. “We need the support of the other departments to do this.”
But Byers, who ran for the NDP in the 2008 federal election, said if MacKay had ordered National Defence to follow established government procurement rules, new search-and-rescue airplanes would already be in the air.
“The reason that this procurement was taken away from Peter MacKay and DND was because they’d screwed up,” he said. “For Mr. MacKay to be arguing that it was not his responsibility is to overlook the history of this procurement.”
NDP defence critic Jack Harris said that as with the F-35, National Defence went about acquiring new search-and-rescue planes “backwards” by deciding what aircraft it wanted before identifying what they needed it to do.
“There’s certainly a valid comparison between the F-35 and the (search-and-rescue airplane) when the military’s making a choice based on the plane that they think they want,” he said.
“They did it with the F-35. They did it with the (search-and-rescue airplane) replacement.”
Liberal defence critic John McKay said this reflects a “worrying pattern” involving military procurement projects that get caught up in “limboland” because proper purchasing rules weren’t followed.
“And the consequence is the fleet is aging to the point where maybe it’s going to fall out of the sky.”
A spokesman for the defence minister, Jay Paxton, said MacKay “is a strong advocate for a replacement aircraft since the process began.”
Meanwhile, the Conservative government announced Wednesday that it had paid another $36.6 million toward development of the F-35, a required contribution to remain a partner within the U.S.-led program.
Canada has paid $267.7 million to date, but the new payment is the first the government has made since pushing the reset button on plans to purchase the stealth fighter late last year.
The payment does not commit Canada to purchasing the F-35, though all of the money will be lost if the government decides to go with another aircraft.
The Harper government pushed the reset button after National Defence put the full cost of Canada buying and operating 65 of the stealth fighters until 2052 at more than $45 billion.
This came after years of criticism over what has been seen as the Conservatives’ refusal to fully disclose how much the F-35s would cost, and after the auditor general raised serious concerns about the Defence Department’s handling of the file.
Bureaucrats have been ordered back to the drawing board to again examine what missions Canada’s jets will perform in the future, what threats they will face, and what fighter capabilities are currently available.
The Royal Canadian Air Force is leading the review with support from other federal departments, while a panel of independent experts has been tasked with monitoring the process to ensure it is rigorous and impartial.
While no timelines have been laid out, a final report will be produced to guide the government as it contemplates the next step in replacing the CF-18s.
However, some experts and opposition critics have alleged the new review is merely smoke and mirrors designed to justify eventually purchasing the stealth fighter.
For opposition politicians, the day an auditor-general’s report is released is pretty much the next best thing to Christmas. I imagine them waking up early, hardly able to contain their excitement. “I wonder what’s in it! Maybe a billion-dollar boondoggle! Or — ooh! — a $16 orange juice!”
You can see the appeal. These are people who spend nearly every day of every year demanding the government spend more, faster, preferably in their riding. Yet on this one day every few months they get to prance about as if they were serious watchdogs on the public purse, wagging their jowls in fury at the colourful tales of waste and mismanagement contained therein.
Not only is it risk-free, politically — who’s in favour of waste and mismanagement? — but by focusing entirely on instances of obvious misspending, it avoids more fundamental questions about spending, as to either its necessity or effectiveness. This is what passes for fiscal conservatism on the opposition benches: don’t spend less, on anything, ever. Just spend better.
And this is how politics gets reduced to mush. Rather than a debate about the role and scope of government, we are told it amounts to hiring better managers. But we didn’t amass $600 billion in public debt as a result of mere waste and mismanagement, nor is the manifest futility, if not harmfulness, of so much of what government does a matter of incompetent bureaucrats.
These are not the product of inadvertence, the mistakes and oversights that are the stuff of auditor-general’s reports. They are deliberate, conscious choices. It is not the overt fiascos that no one would defend that are the problem. It is rather the many hundreds of perfectly competently run programs, enacted with the support of a good part of the population and sustained with the approval of most of the political class.
To be sure, the bigger and broader any institution gets, the more frayed the lines of oversight become, the less sure anyone is of what they are trying to achieve and the more likely it is to produce the odd boondoggle. To take a current example, the government would be less likely to lose track of $3-billion it was supposed to be spending on anti-terrorism programs if it were not spending more than $250-billion every year on everything under the sun.
But the answer is not simply to tighten the screws harder on the whole operation. That’s certainly the Conservatives’ preferred solution: cheaper Big Government, as the economist Stephen Gordon has put it. Far from placing limits on the size and scope of government, they have been content to maintain or even extend its reach — think of all those busy little tax credits, or the raft of subsidies and tax breaks for favoured industries — so long as everyone fills out more paperwork.
There are legitimate questions to be asked whether the rage for “accountability” within the public service, everyone filing two and three reports on everything, has become a false economy. But more than that, it’s beside the point. If everything government currently does is sacrosanct for no reason other than because that’s what government currently does, if no one thinks to ask whether this is something government should be doing at all — if government carries on in much the same elephantine way as before, only with fewer sick days for civil servants — the result will not be better service to the public or even much savings for the taxpayer, but merely a permanently embittered public service.
Surely it is past time to think about more fundamental reforms. Surely it would be in everyone’s best interests, public employees as much as the public they serve, to start asking those very questions about the role of government we have been avoiding until now, to make choices, to focus government on the things it does best — the things that only government can do. Wouldn’t that make for a more exciting, purpose-filled public service, rather than what it has become: a place of constant confrontation, full of sullen, unmotivated people putting in time before their pensions?
Instead, we have the announcement, or rather the disclosure, or perhaps best described as the discovery, via the usual cryptic reference buried deep inside some impenetrable government document — in this case the budget implementation bill — that the cabinet will take direct control of collective bargaining with employees of federal Crown corporations, among them Via Rail, Canada Post and the CBC. Probably this is not the threat to journalistic independence it is being made out to be, but it does at least raise the question of what a Crown corporation is for, if it is not to be at operational arm’s length from government.
But in fact it ought to provoke a more searching discussion. The question many people would ask nowadays about Via, Canada Post and the CBC is not “why isn’t the government sitting in on their labour negotiations,” but why do these three organizations exist in their present form? Is a heavily subsidized state monopoly really the only way to run a railroad? What does it even mean to maintain a state monopoly on first-class mail, when fewer and fewer people send letters of any kind? What purpose does a publicly funded, general-interest broadcaster serve when broadcasting itself is disappearing, as it were, before our eyes?
These are the questions we ought to be asking, but no one does, on either side of the House. They aren’t about “Conservative mismanagement” or “union bosses.” They are about what we want or need government to do.