F-35 deceit, dishonesty damage democracy

It is difficult to imagine how a worse mess could have been made of the F-35 procurement, but I’m willing to bet this government will try.

When I say mess, I don’t mean to suggest charming ineptitude, but culpable incompetence, mixed with deliberate misrepresentation. What started with a catastrophic failure of oversight, progressed through many months of dishonesty, secrecy and stonewalling, culminating in what can only be called electoral fraud — followed by still more dishonesty about everything that had gone before.

So while it is undoubtedly good news that, faced with a pending report showing the cost of the jets at, not the $9 billion first advertised, not the $16 billion the government maintained throughout the last election, not the $25 billion that, as the auditor general later discovered, it had privately been carrying on its own books, but (depending on which leak you believe) in excess of $40 billion, the government has reportedly at last decided to do what it should have done in the first place — put the contract out to an open, competitive bidding process — that does not mean we can simply turn the page. Enormous damage has been done to some fundamental principles and institutions of parliamentary government, not to say the public trust, and someone must be held to account.

This was not, after all, some minor piece of business. At the time, it was the single largest defence procurement the government of Canada had ever made. It was not merely a central issue in the last election, but the proximate cause of it, owing to the government’s refusal to provide Parliament with the information it demanded on the program’s costs. Yet here we are, with all of the government’s previous arguments and explanations in tatters, and not one of those responsible has paid any price whatever.

For those just joining us, a recap:

Defence officials, long entranced by the F-35’s advanced technology, persuaded successive ministers of defence, Gordon O’Connor and Peter MacKay, to approve the purchase with the promise of billions in spinoff “industrial benefits” for the Canadian aerospace industry.

Virtually no documentation was provided in support of any of these claims, nor were any of the usual rules and procedures followed.

As reported by the auditor general, the department had decided on the plane it wanted to replace our aging fleet of CF-18s well in advance of the actual procurement process: The “operational requirements” for the plane were then written in such a way as to ensure that only the F-35 could bid. The extent of Public Works’ due diligence, before it signed off on the sole-source contract, was to ask Defence to write it a letter.

Ministers then went to work selling the planes to the public — but in the absence of either the statement of operational requirements or accurate cost figures, the public were in no position to form a judg- ment, either of the plane’s necessity or its cost-effectiveness. When the parliamentary budget officer began to ask questions about the published cost figures, he was first stiff-armed, then lied to; when he issued his own estimates, they were dismissed as inaccurate.

When, after the election — an election, I repeat, fought and won on the basis of the government’s own, fraudulent numbers — the auditor general issued his own report, vindicating the PBO’s estimate and exposing the mismanagement of the procurement process, the government pretended to be chastened. It “accepted” his findings, it said, though the departments involved had formally rejected them — as if there could be a separation, constitutionally, between the two.

Meanwhile government MPs publicly attacked the auditor general’s credibility, while the minister of defence professed amazement at the strange new accounting rules the auditor general had used to calculate the jets’ full “life-cycle” costs: rules that are in fact the standard across government and across NATO, rules which his own department had formally agreed to not two years before, after being rapped across the knuckles by a previous auditor general in the wake of yet another procurement fiasco.

In sum, virtually every safeguard that was supposed to protect the public purse and the public interest was subverted, evaded, or rolled over. Ministers failed to exercise oversight over their departments; Parliament was prevented from exercising oversight over ministers; the public was kept in the dark throughout. You could have backed a truck up to the Defence Department and loaded it up with $40 billion, for all our traditional checks and balances were concerned.

Indeed, had the auditor general and the parliamentary budget officer never issued their reports, it is an open question whether we would still be committed, even today, to the same process, and the same plane, as before. Nothing in this government’s record offers any confidence it would ever have altered course on its own.

So this is about much more than the F-35. It’s not even about procurement, though it is clearly in need of radical overhaul (can we please just buy the best planes for the least money, and leave the corporate welfare out of it?). Rather, this is about democracy.

If ever proof were needed of the weakness of our democratic institutions — and of the urgent necessity of reform — this is it. Democratic accountability, we should now be able to see, isn’t some abstract, academic issue, divorced from the bread-and-butter concerns of the public. It’s about as bread-and-butter as it gets. It’s about their money.