Tories try to minimize damage of F-35 debacle
No matter how hard it tries, government can’t explain why it ignored warning signs
No matter what happens now, the F-35 episode will stand as a spectacular example of how not to manage an important public project. One can call it ramshackle, slipshod, inept, dishonest and incompetent, and not even begin to do events justice. Had they deliberately set out to spiral-dive their reputations for sound management and probity into the ground, Peter MacKay & Co. could not have done a better job than the record shows these past three years.
What the government can do, in its announcement expected Wednesday or early Thursday, is staunch the bleeding. Evidently it intends to try.
Since Postmedia News reported last Thursday that the F-35 fighter procurement, as a sole-source purchase, is dead, the government has been in full damage-control mode. Poor Jacques Gourde, parliamentary secretary for the minister of Public Works, was propped up in the House of Commons to deflect calls for MacKay’s ouster. The defence minister’s own parliamentary secretary, Chris Alexander, was wheeled out to take fire on TV and radio. Alexander, who was a capable ambassador to Kabul not so long ago, has looked displeased with his mission. Few would blame him. The prime minister himself, of course, resorted to the economic argument: It’s all about the jobs, for Canadian workers building widgets for the F-35.
Unclear, yet, is how $435 million in defence sub-contracts justifies the $40-billionplus expenditure of public money envisioned in the KPMG audit, which precipitated the government’s reversal. Also unclear is the extent to which these contracts are even in jeopardy, setting aside which aircraft is eventually selected to replace the RCAF’s aging F-18s.
MacKay, who alongside his former associate minister, Julian Fantino (and of course Harper), is most responsible for the wreckage, has all but vanished. It’s been left to Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose, the only minister with any connection to the F-35 who still has any credibility, to pick her way through the debris. She will do so, it is widely expected, by unveiling either a competition for the fighter contract, or a process that will lead to one.
The counter spin to the KPMG audit will hold, first, that assessing costs on a 40-year timeline is distortive, because the numbers obviously must rise if you tally 40 years’ flight time compared with, say, 20. The government’s defenders will further argue that the jets’ base acquisition cost is still $9 billion, as stated in 2010. Finally, they’ll say the F-35 would not be particularly different, cost-wise, from competing fighters such as Saab’s Gripen, Boeing’s Super Hornet, Dassault’s Rafale or the Eurofighter Typhoon. The first argument is technically correct but politically untenable, because of sticker shock. The latter two arguments are simply wrong.
The $9 billion is predicated on a new per-plane price of about $90 million, according to reports. Independent estimates of the all-in per-plane cost of an F-35, including the weapons systems, come in at $150 million or more. Even that, at best, is an educated guess. The price is tied to the number of orders in a given year. If there are further delays or cancellations — which is likely, given recessions in Europe and Japan — the cost rises. This does not apply to the four other competing aircraft, which, unlike the F-35, are already fully developed and flying in militaries around the world.
In unveiling their new-new process, chastened ministers will shelter beneath Ambrose’s personal Harry Potter invisibility cloak, which she has earned by not engaging in the asinine talking point babble that has become a substitute for reason in this House of Commons. They will continue to exploit Alexander’s reputation, until it too no longer functions.
What they cannot so easily address is why MacKay, Fantino, the apparatus of the Prime Minister’s Office and Harper himself ignored so many credible warnings, which came from so many credible quarters, that solesourcing the F-35 was a terrible idea. Nor can they undo that, for months on end, they met these legitimate voices, such as that of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, with contempt.
The jet purchase they can fix, with a competition. The cast of mind that got them here, not so much. Absent a radical overhaul of cabinet, and a miraculous transformation in their approach to wielding power, they will wear it.
It’s too colossal a bungle to set aside.