At the same time, a new Public Works Department secretariat Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) government established to take over management of the procurement has become shrouded in secrecy.
The non-partisan media relations branch of Public Works unable through all of last week to provide answers to The Hill Times about inexplicable changes and delay of an independent cost audit of the acquisition.
An NDP source said the party has scheduled a “roundtable” to be held on Parliament Hill Tuesday, Aug. 21, so MPs can gather information they were unable to obtain during the Public Accounts Committee hearings, which the Conservative majority attempted to end prior to the summer adjournment. The NDP roundtable will feature experts such as Alan Williams, the former procurement chief at National Defence who has spearheaded a campaign against the sole-sourced F-35 acquisition.
NDP MP Malcom Allen (Welland, Ont.) conducted a filibuster through several meetings to prevent a vote on a motion from Conservative MP Andrew Saxton (North Vancouver, B.C.) that would have ended the inquiry and forced the committee into preparing a report on the inquiry to Parliament prior to the House rising for the summer recess.
Up until that time, the Conservatives prevented the committee from hearing evidence from any of the ministers involved, including Defence Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.), then-Associate Defence Minister Julian Fantino (Vaughan, Ont.) and Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose (Edmonton-Spruce Grove, Alta.).
Mr. Allen told The Hill Times last week he is ready to continue his filibuster if the government attempts to shut the Public Accounts inquiry down when Parliament resumes next month.
“The committee is going to come back and continue on,” Mr. Allen said. “Andrew Saxton has made it clear that they don’t believe we should have any more witnesses, that we should just simply write a report and get on with it. We’ve heard from enough people—that’s their position.”
Mr. Allen questioned how the Conservatives could say that, however, not having talked to the ministers involved. “You get one minister [Ms. Ambrose] who admits they actually need outside help to get a true figure, and they won’t allow us to talk to outside folks or even to ask the minister, in this case Minister Ambrose, ‘Well, why would you want to do that, what don’t you have faith in?’” he said.
Auditor General Michael Ferguson chastised Public Works as well as National Defence last April in an explosive report to Parliament. Mr. Ferguson’s report accused National Defence and the government of withholding $10-billion worth of future operating costs for the proposed fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets. He also slammed Public Works for failing to demonstrate “due diligence” by accepting a one-page letter from National Defence as justification for sole-sourcing the F-35 aircraft, without competitive bids, on the grounds it was the only new fighter jet that could meet Canada’s needs.
Mr. Ferguson went further when he appeared at the House Public Accounts Committee hearings into his report, saying that Cabinet would have been aware of the $10-billion costs National Defence kept secret as the May 2, 2011, federal election neared. National Defence deputy minister Robert Fonberg later told the committee that Cabinet made the decision to keep the $10-billion in operating costs secret.
In late June, the government quietly published a request for bids, sent out to some of the largest accounting firms in Canada, for an audit of new F-35 costing estimates from National Defence. The government had promised the report would be tabled in Parliament within 60 days of getting new cost forecasts from the U.S.-led consortium that is buying the aircraft, still under testing and development, from Lockheed Martin, the largest defence equipment and technology supplier to the U.S. military.
The new request for bids puts the date of a final report to the government to Nov. 27, from Oct. 24, meaning the audit, and the National Defence F-35 estimates, will likely not be tabled in Parliament in sufficient time for committee hearings before the nearly two-month winter recess.
“It seems very suspect,” Mr. Allen said of the delay in the report to Parliament. “They get the report basically at the end of November, which means they’ll take some time to look at it, review it, obviously it’s got to go to the minister through the department. That won’t happen in a day.”
Mr. Allen said the government will likely “dump” the report on the last sitting day. “[The government willl] say, ‘Well, we tabled it in Parliament, see you later.’ Basically there’s no one there to hold the government to account on the actual report,” he said.
The Public Works Department posted a new request for bids during the first week of August, transferring contract authority for the work to Public Works from the Treasury Board Secretariat and changed a term that would allow the winning bidder to also use a limited number of sub-contractors without professional accounting qualifications.
The new tender also did not include a contract value, which in the first bid was between $1-million and $2-million.
Mr. Allen and Liberal MP John McKay (Scarborough-Guildwood, Ont.) took issue with contracting authority being moved from the neutral Treasury Board Secretariat to Public Works, which Mr. Ferguson pointed is at the centre of the F-35 controversy.
“Treasury Board Secretariat actually are the ones who write the rules for all the departments to follow when it comes to how they spend money,” Mr. Allen said last week. “I would prefer that the Treasury Board Secretariat be the arm’s length one doing the contract, because Public Works is now overseeing what it does [itself]. … You need to have folks who were at arms length of all of this. You’ve got folks who will ostensibly be looking into their own actions. If you want to build any credibility around this whole thing, I’m not sure at this point how they’re going to do that.”
Mr. McKay agreed the delay will hinder Parliamentary scrutiny of the estimates, and also said Treasury Board should have authority over the contract.
“Clearly, in the wrestling match about who’s going to be running this secretariat, the Public Works folks have won and are sidelining the Treasury Board Secretariat,” Mr. McKay said. “It’s the Treasury Board Secretariat in name only. In fact it’s Public Works that’s running this.”
By last Friday, the Public Works Department, and the secretariat, had failed to explain to The Hill Times why it had taken a month to revise the request for bids, after professional accounting firms told the government in early July they would be required to be able to use non-professionals, such as research assistants, as well as professionally certified accountants. The original bid specified a requirement that the team conducting the audit would have to be 100-per-cent certified accountants.
Departmental media relations personnel responded with unprecedented conduct after The Hill Times emailed questions about a new request for bids on the F-35 cost auditing Public Works posted on the Merx tendering site in early audit. The manager of the branch was unable to explain through the week why answers to several short questions were not being answered, and officials in the branch refused to put customary electronic signatures on the bottom of the few emails they sent in response to the request for information.
By Friday, it appeared that the information logjam was due to either disagreement among several government departments that comprise the new secretariat, and responsible for key changes to the bid documents opposition MPs said could delay the audit report—ostensibly to confirm cost estimates for the F-35 that are being prepared in secret by the Department of National Defence—and also seem to be putting the Public Works Department once again at the decision-making centre of the procurement.
Meanwhile, procurement experts told The Hill Times last week that the U.S. is likely pressuring Canada to remain in the program and purchase F-35s even if less are bought because of rising costs.
“For Canada to start wobbling at this stage would be a very, very serious blow to the program,” Bill Sweetman, chief editor for the Washington-based Defense Technology at Aviation Week, told The Hill Times last Wednesday.
Recent estimates based on U.S. cost forecasts are now up to an estimated acquisition cost of more $120-million per plane for Canada compared to a 2010 government cost estimate of $75-million per aircraft, not including maintenance and operating costs for the lifetime of the fleet. The government has frozen the initial acquisition cost at $9-billion, and National Defence has internally estimated a further $16-billion for maintenance and operating costs over 20 years. The acquisition cost includes new infrastructure such as runway extensions.
Mr. Sweetman predicted Mr. Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) government will press on with the F-35 acquisition despite statements that it is considering “all options” following AG Ferguson’s highly critical report. The government has also pointed out, as part of its response to Mr. Ferguson, that no planes have yet been purchased and no contracts to buy any of the aircraft have yet been signed.
“They’re saying that, but I don’t think they want to do that,” Mr. Sweetman said about the government’s attempt to signal it has not ruled any other aircraft out.
“What is happening in other countries [is] there is very strong pressure on the Canadians, on Canada, to buy the JSF [Joint Strike Fighter F-35], from the U.S.,” he said, referring to several countries who are part of a consortium developing the plane in partnership with the United States that have reduced the number of aircraft they intend to buy.
“Nobody ever likes to be forced by somebody else into accepting that they made an error, or simply that they didn’t exercise due diligence in making a decision. Due diligence in this case sort of meant seeing actually what else was on offer,” Mr. Sweetman said of the Conservative government’s predicament.
Liberal MP Marc Garneau (Westmount-Ville Marie, Que.) agreed the government is likely under U.S. pressure to stick with the F-35 acquisition, whatever new cost forecasts emerge from the independent audit.
“I think it is under enormous pressure,” said Mr. Garneau, a former Canadian naval officer and astronaut who has been in space three times on NASA shuttle missions. “There are a number of partners who have partnered into this and if one of the partners decides to remove themselves—and over the last couple of years, countries like Italy and Norway and the Netherlands have made noises about delaying or cutting back or even pulling out—it’s the domino thing.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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