{"id":44317,"date":"2018-07-30T03:00:15","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T07:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44317"},"modified":"2018-07-29T13:24:40","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T17:24:40","slug":"auditor-general-to-look-at-the-rcafs-capability-gap-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/30\/auditor-general-to-look-at-the-rcafs-capability-gap-claim\/","title":{"rendered":"Auditor General to look at the RCAF’s “capability gap” claim"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Campbell<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I see in a Canadian Press report published in the Globe and Mail<\/em><\/a> that \u201cCanada\u2019s auditor general has started to dig into one of the Trudeau government\u2019s 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 \u2026 [and] \u2026 The claim was first made in November, 2016, when the Liberals announced that Canada didn\u2019t have enough fighter jets to defend North America and simultaneously meet the country\u2019s NATO commitments, and that a stopgap was urgently needed until the entire CF-18 fleet could be replaced.\u201c<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll remember, I hope, that back in 1997 Canada\u2019s government (Jean Chr\u00e9tien 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 \u2018low ball\u2018 the actual costs, partially because almost no one in government can agree on how to define \u2018life cycle costs,\u2018 partially because most Canadian journalists are nearly innumerate and partially because the Liberal \u2018war room\u2018 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 \u201can open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, when in power the Liberal \u201cgovernment 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 \u2026 [but] \u2026 critics, including opposition parties and former air force commanders, accuse the government of fabricating an urgent \u201ccapability gap\u201d \u2013 as the shortfall is known \u2013 by changing the military\u2019s requirements to avoid having to buy the F-35 stealth fighter.\u201d The rumour ~ and that\u2019s 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 \u201ccheap and dirty,\u201d 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 \u201copen and transparent competition\u201d while already having decided that the F-35 could not win.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cCanada\u2019s auditor general has started to dig […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,53],"tags":[123,220,214],"class_list":["post-44317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-military","category-politics","tag-aircraft","tag-nato","tag-rcaf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bwN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44318,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44317\/revisions\/44318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}