Opinion: Ottawa needs a poverty reduction strategy

time had come to renew Canada’s maritime patrol and search and rescue helicopters, unquestionably near the top of the big-ticket item list and a purchase that would require the highest technical expertise. Home Depot lists 2,993 commodes on its website, down which procurement officers could flush tax dollars; but how many helicopters could there be to choose from? Granted, helicopters, like computers, are enormously complex machines, but that would only serve to diminish the number of options available for purchase.

Two years into its first mandate, the Mulroney government selected the Augusta Westland EH-101 to replace the ageing Sea Kings, which were already showing signs of failure. The price tag was $5.8 billion. Thing is, eight years later not a single EH101 had been deployed, giving the opportunity for the incoming Chrétien government to cancel the order, at a cost of $500 million in fees. He couldn’t have done that had the delivery schedule not been permitted to move like the glaciers.

The Chrétien government was successful in moving Canada away from a banana republican fiscal cliff and into the budgetary red, but military procurement didn’t exactly ramp up to supersonic speed. 28 CH-148 Cyclones from Sikorsky were ordered in 2004 by the Martin government. Technical issues delayed the arrival of the first 6 for another 11 years. The original delivery date was 2005. DND documents began questioning the overall suitability of the product, not surprising considering that the procurement was so overdue and the requirements so out of date. What somebody failed to anticipate was that air crews were unable to begin training by the 2016 deadline because of a lack of trained technical and ground crew personnel.

In 2012, then Defence Minister Peter MacKay called it “the worst procurement in the history of Canada,” hyperbole aimed at the previous government from a man whose own government had already been in power for six years. Cocky MacKay stepped in his own pile of procurement manure Canada and other countries had already signed on to the F-35 development consortium at the behest of the US Defence Department. The decision was driven by economics, not procurement. Alan S. Williams was the Assistant Deputy Minister of National Defence who signed the original industrial participation agreement, who clarified that Canadian companies were allowed to compete for contracts within the program, and the Canadian Forces would receive insider information regarding the F-35 as a possible future replacement for the CF-18s. The Harper government proceeded with a memorandum of understanding in 2006 to further invest in the consortium, securing assurances that Canadian companies could bid on supply contracts. The RCAF had concluded that the as-yet-to-be developed F-35 would suit its needs and budget. That’s when the clown train crashed. In June 2010, Peter MacKay announced the government would buy the F-35s. 90 minutes later, he said he’d goofed and announced there will be an open competition. Six weeks later, MacKay announced that Canada would purchase 65 F-35s for $9 billion. The all-in totals ballooned out of control. In April 2012 Auditor-General John Ferguson revealed it would cost $25 billion including operating costs for the first 20 years alone, and $45 billion over the 30-year anticipated lifespan. The original consortium deal was to bring major savings and lucrative The Bureaucracy is the only continuity in government, in both the military and the broader public service. Command and control flows from the top down in any hierarchical system, but information needs to flow both ways. Research flows up to where it is eventually supposed to coalesce into a top-level decision. It takes plenty of eyes and hours to analyze thousands of pages of documents, and plenty of brains to reduce it all down to the salient points. But government procurement seems to have become more about risk avoidance versus communicating sound logic. Any contractor who has ever been invited to develop a concept with any government department or agency has likely spent interminable hours with a half-a-dozen bureaucrats who would without warning pull the plug in the 11th hour. Silicon Valley has an obscene term for it: brain rape. Live in Ottawa long enough and you’ll hear the horror stories. Scale a one-person contract fiasco up to the level of military procurement, add in what former AG Sheila Fraser identified as a tendency to contrive numbers that under-estimate and under-state costs, keep transparency at all levels as opaque as possible, and you get what the great Allan ‘Dr. Foth’ Fotheringham used to call “muddifying the fuzzification.” David Perry of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute estimates that nearly 25 per cent of all money allocated by federal budgets for defence procurement annually goes unspent, due largely to bureaucratic clogs, outdated practices and competing factions within the military itself. It goes like this: Assemble a huge team to design a horse; end up with a donkey. Cover your asses, create a void, fill in with convolution, defer to team two, and start again. We’ve come a long way since the days when C. D. Howe led the total mobilization of all national resources to the war effort. We’ll all be speaking North Korean before that ever happens again n It takes plenty of eyes and hours to analyze thousands of pages of documents, and plenty of brains to reduce it all down to the salient points. But government procurement seems to have become more about risk avoidance versus communicating sound logic.

It’s a clean, reliable and affordable energy source that powers our homes and businesses.