Ted Campbell reports on the news that the Auditor General will investigate the Trudeau government’s claim that the RCAF would be unable to meet its obligations due to a newly discovered lack of airframes:
I see in a Canadian Press report published in the Globe and Mail that “Canada’s auditor general has started to dig into one of the Trudeau government’s most contentious claims, upon which rests the fate of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars: that the country is facing an urgent shortage of fighter jets … [and] … The claim was first made in November, 2016, when the Liberals announced that Canada didn’t have enough fighter jets to defend North America and simultaneously meet the country’s NATO commitments, and that a stopgap was urgently needed until the entire CF-18 fleet could be replaced.“
You’ll remember, I hope, that back in 1997 Canada’s government (Jean Chrétien was our Liberal prime minister) decided to join the US (but soon multi-national) F-35 Lightening II programme with the implicit intention of buying the aircraft and the explicit goal of sharing in the work, profits and jobs that the project might create. In 2010 the Government of Canada (Stephen Harper was the Conservative prime minister) committed to buying the aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force. There ensued an almighty public row over costs ~ partially because some generals and some DND officials tried to ‘low ball‘ the actual costs, partially because almost no one in government can agree on how to define ‘life cycle costs,‘ partially because most Canadian journalists are nearly innumerate and partially because the Liberal ‘war room‘ launched a disinformation campaign ~ and that rocked the Harper government back on its heels and made it a campaign issue. In 2015 the Liberal Party promised that Canada would not buy the F-35 but would, instead, hold “an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.”
Then, when in power the Liberal “government originally planned to buy 18 interim Super Hornets from Boeing for $6.4-billion before the deal was scuttled late last year in favour of buying 25 used jets from Australia for $500-million … [but] … critics, including opposition parties and former air force commanders, accuse the government of fabricating an urgent “capability gap” – as the shortfall is known – by changing the military’s requirements to avoid having to buy the F-35 stealth fighter.” The rumour ~ and that’s all it ever amounted to, as far as i know ~ floating around Ottawa was that the Liberals saw the Boeing Super Hornet fighter as a “cheap and dirty,” readily available solution and they felt confident that they could, easily back away from the promise to hold a competition, thus avoiding the dilemma of having an “open and transparent competition” while already having decided that the F-35 could not win.
