Watchdog wonders who will fly second-hand jets

OTTAWA — The Trudeau government pressed ahead with its plan to buy secondhand fighter jets from Australia on Tuesday despite withering fire from the federal auditor general, who warned that the military might not have anybody to fly them.

Six years after blowing up the Harper government’s plan to buy new F-35s without a competition, auditor general Michael Ferguson targeted the Liberals’ own attempts to buy jets. He first picked apart the government’s aborted plan to purchase “interim” Super Hornets to bolster Canada’s aging CF-18 fleet, and then its current plan to buy used Australian fighters.

The government says those extra fighters are needed to address a shortage of CF-18s until a state-of-the-art replacement can be purchased and delivered — a lengthy process that will run through 2032, at which point the CF18s will be 50 years old.

But the auditor general’s office arrived at a very different conclusion: The military doesn’t need more planes because it doesn’t even have the pilots and mechanics to operate what it already has. What it really needs, the office found, is more people.

Yet only a few hours after the auditor general’s report was released, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the Liberals had signed a contract to buy the 18 second-hand jets from Australia. Officials have pegged the cost at around $500 million.