In a motion tabled at the Public Accounts Committee hearings into Mr. Ferguson’s politically-charged report released in April on the federal government’s F-35 procurement, the NDP raised the possibility on Tuesday that it believes the deputy minister of National Defence, Rob Fonberg, may be in contempt of Parliament because of his insistence in early testimony that Mr. Ferguson was wrong to tell the committee that Cabinet approved a total budget of $25-billion for the acquisition and operations of 65 F-35 stealth fighter jets two years before Defence Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.) announced the procurement plan in 2010.
The contradiction centred on one of Mr. Ferguson’s most incendiary findings and his later statements to the House Public Accounts Committee and to journalists, when he said DND and Cabinet withheld more than $10-billion in operating and maintenance costs from Parliament and the public in March, 2011, prior to a federal election, as the government was responding to a report from Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page that pegged the total F-35 costs at $29-billion.
Mr. Fonberg's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the NDP motion.
The Department of National Defence also declined comment. "It is inappropriate for the Department of National Defence to offer comment on a motion that may be before a Parliamentary committee," stated DND's public affairs officer Capt. Shalako Smith in an email to The Hill Times.
NDP MP Malcolm Allen (Welland, Ont.) made public the party’s concern over a possible contempt of Parliament when he explained the NDP position to The Hill Timesfollowing a committee meeting on Tuesday.
The motion, from NDP MP Glenn Thibeault (Sudbury, Ont.), calls on the committee to “report to the House on the facts of a possible contempt of Parliament arising from contradictions in testimony between the Auditor General of Canada and the Deputy Minister of National Defence with regard to the costing of F-35 aircraft.”
In his report, as well as during committee testimony, Mr. Ferguson said the government established an acquisition budget of $9-billion in May 2008, when it unveiled a new defence strategy for Canada and at the same time established a $16-billion budget to operate and sustain the aircraft over 20 years. Up until Mr. Fraser’s report last April, the government had only released a total forecast budget of $14-billion.
Mr. Fonberg told the committee that National Defence did not have a budget totalling $25-billion in 2008 or 2009.
“We never had such an estimate, so you’d have to ask him about where that estimate actually came from,” Mr. Fonberg said to the committee on May 1.
When the committee recalled Mr. Ferguson to respond to Mr. Fonberg’s statement, the auditor general told the committee: “We didn’t do any of our own estimates or analysis, all the numbers included in the chapter we got from National Defence.”
Meanwhile, as the NDP went on the offensive against the government over Mr. Fonberg’s testimony on Tuesday, Liberal MP Gerry Byrne (Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, Nfld.) accused the NDP and the government of using secrecy provisions of the meetings to thwart Liberal attempts to call more witnesses and to continue the hearings as Parliament's summer recess nears.
“What’s surfacing on the outside is not what’s happening on the inside, it’s not the full story,” Mr. Byrne told The Hill Timesafter the two-hour Public Accounts Committee session ended. “The NDP are protesting the in-camera process, and then [using it] to prevent certain details of their motions and their strategies from being exposed,” Mr. Byrne said. “We’re asking for openness.”
Dissension in the opposition ranks broke open last week, when the chair of the government oversight committee, NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.) publicly lashed out at Mr. Byrne, the only Liberal on the panel, for using the Commons Question Period to challenge a ruling from Mr. Christopherson that allowed a government motion to end the inquiry and begin a report to the Commons to take precedence over two motions from Mr. Byrne calling for more witnesses, as well as key documents from National Defence.
As well, while the NDP has protested that a government attempt to force an end to the hearings and begin preparing a report to the Commons, the NDP moved a motion in one of the earlier in-camera sessions that, while calling for more witnesses, also called for the final hearing to be held May 31 prior to preparation of a report to the House.
“There’s a lot more collaboration going on between the Conservatives and the NDP than anyone has been able to understand or be aware of, because of the in-camera nature of the proceedings,” Mr. Byrne told The Hill Times on Tuesday.
Mr. Byrne said the confrontations behind closed doors of the committee are likely attributable to wider political ground at stake, as both the Conservative Party and the NDP attempt to diminish the role of the Liberal Party in Parliament and to reduce its likelihood of recovering from the devastating losses it suffered in the 2011 federal election.
“This whole exercise for me and for others has been highly illustrative,” Mr. Byrne said. “When given an opportunity to give a knockout punch to the NDP versus just simply thwart a Liberal initiative, the government will actually forego a knockout punch to the NDP and wants to sustain them, and prefer to just throw the Liberals off track, and vice-versa.”
Mr. Allen dismissed Mr. Byrne’s allegations.
“The position that we are taking and the efforts that we are making is to have additional witnesses, have additional hearing time, before we write the F-35 report,” he said. “That’s what we’ve said from the get go, that’s what I continue to say, that’s what I’ve been saying, and I am the lead for the official opposition on this file, in public accounts.”
“Mr. Byrne clearly is feeling the after effects of last year’s election, I guess maybe it’s taken him this long to feel the effect, that he’s the third party, and he has one seat at the table. That’s voters’ choice, that’s not my decision. We’re going to continue to fight with the government over the issue, that we need to talk to additional witnesses,” said Mr. Allen.
Mr. MacKay on Monday disclosed to the Commons that a 2010 media spectacle featuring a full-scale model of the F-35 cost taxpayers at least $47,313. Mr. MacKay said, in response to a written House question from Liberal MP John MacKay (Scarborough-Guildwood, Ont.), that Lockheed Martin, the U.S. aeronautics giant that is developing and manufacturing the aircraft, paid for the cost of trucking the air frame from Forth Worth, Texas, to Ottawa and also paid for and applied the Canadian markings to the model. A spokesman for Mr. MacKay told The Canadian Press that nearly half the cost went to a private firm that set up the media services for the event.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Tim Naumetz
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