Watching Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hapless political aerobatics over the F-35 stealth fighter fiasco, it’s hard not to think of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or maybe a comic film from the early days of flight. The Tory “barnstormers” keep slamming into the barn instead of performing elegant barrel rolls and loop-the-loops high above it.The Conservative government’s credibility as a prudent steward of public funds has gone down in flames. Defence Minister Peter MacKay has been fatally discredited. The military has been ridiculed for buying a flying pig in a poke. And no amount of “pressing reset” involving blue-ribbon oversight panels, KPMG audits, third-party reviews, 7-point plans and other controls is going to repair the damage caused by the mendacity that has tainted this file from the get-go. This is the Tories’ biggest bungle yet, and it may hurt them in the next election.
Yet as interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae rightly observed, “this government hasn’t apologized to Canadians,” and ministers haven’t taken any responsibility. “From the Prime Minister on down, they’ve pretended as if it never happened,” he said Thursday.
While the Harper government has finally awakened to the damage it has suffered and has rightly launched a wider search to replace our aging CF-18 Hornets, the government is still resisting the opposition’s clamour for an open competition. The F-35 is still in the running. Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose merely promises “due diligence, oversight and transparency,” three things glaringly missing so far from this skewed process. The Harper government still hasn’t explained convincingly why it didn’t opt for a competition in the first place, or why it kept Parliament and the public in the dark for years as to the true costs.
The nosebleed $45.8 billion cost of the F-35A Lightning II over its full service life, or $600 million per jet as set out in the KPMG audit this week, is just part of it. No modern warplane, costed out over a 42-year cycle, will be cheap. That includes Boeing’s Super Hornet and the Eurofighter Typhoon, two other options under review.
What’s far more damaging is the way the Conservatives rushed to sole-source the F-35, MacKay’s dogged insistence that “this is the right aircraft,” their hyperventilating efforts to discredit critics during the 2011 election, their downplaying of development problems and their lowball cost estimates.
A plane that was supposed to roll off the Lockheed Martin assembly line at a “fly-away” cost of $75 million apiece will now cost $92 million, federal documents show. Rather than get 65 F-35s for the $9 billion Ottawa is prepared to spend, we may have to settle for 55, KPMG warns. That’s below the 65 minimum the air force says it needs. Alternatively, the KPMG numbers suggest that Ottawa should be prepared to shell out nearly $2 billion more for the full fleet.
And that may not be an end to the pain. Earlier this year the U.S. Government Accountability Office put the current average “procurement” cost at $137 million.
However you crunch the numbers, it’s hard to conclude that Ottawa can get the number of warplanes it wants within budget.
Ideally, Canada’s fighters should be interoperable with American warplanes, but this is a case in which the U.S. may have priced its hardware out of reach. Sticker shock is forcing even the Pentagon, and various allies, to pare back planned purchases. Unless the U.S. is prepared to guarantee the unit price, more allies may get cold feet.
As the Star noted in this space on Sunday, Canadians are still flying blind on the F-35. We need to know what the air force really needs to defend Canada’s interests in the coming decades. We need to know the true price, plus the full life-cycle costs not only of the F-35 but also of its competitors. And we need to know what benefits manufacturers are prepared to offer to get our business.
Mostly, let’s have no more flying circuses. The Tories look foolish enough.
Original Article
Source: the star
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