The Public Works communications office accidentally included The Hill Times as one of the recipients of an email it sent to officials in the Privy Council Office to show the powerful PCO branch a copy of an email Public Works had prepared in response to a Hill Times report posted Monday about the government’s plan to review F-35 costs, following Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s scathing report on the stealth warplane project last April.
In the email, Public Works denied that an obscure footnote in the government’s new F-35 management plan to be set up in Public Works means an independent review of $25-billion in estimated F-35 costs will not have access to key data and estimates from the U.S. that Canada’s Department of National Defence has been using to establish its own cost estimates for aircraft acquisition and maintenance.
“Please find below for your information what we will send to Tim Naumetz,” the Public Works Department email said. It went on to explain the email to The Hill Times had already been approved by the Public Works secretariat now in charge of the F-35 project, as well as the office of Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose (Edmonton-Sherwood Park, Alta.
The clarification from Public Works—which prior to that had not answered The Hill Times questions about the issue that were submitted last Thursday—centred on a review the federal Treasury Board will contract out to a private-sector firm to independently verify Department of National Defence F-35 cost projections.
The auditor general in his April report accused National Defence of withholding more than $10-billion worth of costs for operating the F-35 over 20 years when it told Parliament a fleet of 65 F-35s the government had announced it will acquire would cost only $14-billion over 20 years.
Under the heading, “Transparency and Impartiality,” the terms of reference for the new F-35 secretariat in Public Works state that Treasury Board will “commission an independent review of DND’s acquisition and sustainment project assumptions and potential costs for the F-35, which will be made public.”
But a footnote at the end of the lengthy document, following an annex that reiterates the government’s original response to Mr. Ferguson, notes that “acquisition and sustainment assumptions received from the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter Program Office will not be included in this review.”
MPs and experts took the footnote to mean that cost estimates and assumptions the F-35 office in Washington, VA., provides to National Defence will not be available to the outside reviewers from the private sector. Ms. Ambrose appeared to confirm that interpretations during Commons question period on Tuesday.
But at 6 p.m. Tuesday, in its first reply to questions from last week about the meaning of the footnote, said no information would be denied.
“We would like to provide you with additional context and clarification on a point you raised in your article published on The Hill Times website last evening with respect to the footnote in the secretariat’s terms of reference,” said the email from Public Works to The Hill Times that was also sent to the strategic communications branch of the PCO.
“The company contracted to undertake the independent review of project assumptions and costs related to the project will not be denied any information,” the email said. “The intent of the footnote is to underscore that the company will not be asked to validate the original U.S. program baseline assumptions, which would amount to a Canadian review of the entire U.S. program. The review will be focused on determining how the baseline information, that is provided to all program partners, is used to develop Canadian costing estimates.”
Opposition MPs and former a former procurement official at National Defence said it was difficult to understand why Public Works took so long to respond, and that the answer itself was still unclear.
As of late Wednesday afternoon Public Works had still not responded to a request for a categorical statement that the outside review will have access to the U.S. data, and a request to explain why such important information was inserted as a footnote to the secretariat’s terms of reference rather than as a full provision within the document.
A media relations official with the department said the earlier response to The Hill Times had not been sent to PCO for its approval, but did not know whether all media responses to questions about the F-35 are first sent to the cabinet department. Although the Privy Council Office is a department that supports all Cabinet operations, it is in charge of the entire public service and answers to Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.).
“How can they be transparent if they don’t even know what they’re doing,” said NDP MP Malcolm Allen (Welland, Ont.). “We don’t have Public Works giving clarity to what is their document, and we’ve got PCO giving strategic communications to what is a document that belongs to Public Works.”
“Who’s running the show here, Public Works or PCO?” he said
Former procurement official Alan Williams, who was assistant deputy minister for procurement at National Defence as the F-35 project began, questioned why Public Works would believe anyone might have assumed the independent review would extend into the U.S.
“All they can do is look at the trail,” Mr. Williams said. “What information did DND get and how did that get transferred onward or upward? Did they misinterpret, did they manipulate, or was that the information given to them by the program office?”
“You would have thought that that would have been the answer to you within an hour of your enquiry,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Ambrose in Question Period on Tuesday, defended the secretariat’s efforts to independently validate cost estimates for the F-35s.
“It is true that the costing figures are available from the Joint Strike Fighter program in the United States, but what we have said is that we want those figures, that would be cost estimates from the Department of National Defence, to be independently validated. The secretariat has asked for more time to do that. It wants to do this comprehensively. It is also looking at independently validating the cost assumptions that the Department of National Defence is using and meeting the recommendations of the auditor general,” said Ms. Ambrose.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Tim Naumetz
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