Is it made in Canada? That should be the rule. We should be focusing on that.
Why are the government people going out on their own and possibly violating government rules? Again, we have 28 pages and 50 lines per page of stuff. Some of it was neat. General Dynamics is in there. We sole-source missiles with General Dynamics, which is pretty cool. It lists which ones. There are bullets, rockets, cannon shells and stuff like that.
I want to move on to the sole-sourcing. One of the things that worries me very greatly is the whole larger procurement thing that's going on. We've asked repeatedly to have a procurement study here. That's been shut down continually. I'm not really sure why. Procurement goes back.... Procurement was a problem in the previous government. It was a problem under Chrétien; there were scandals then. There were problems under Martin. This is a non-partisan thing that we need to fix not only for taxpayers, but also for our military and the Coast Guard.
Leonardo was recently in the news. If you don't know what Leonardo is, it's one of the companies that was bidding on the fixed-wing search and rescue plane. There were 18 of them. This goes back to a previous problem with procurement that was made famous because the original RFP that someone delivered was I think 3,700 pounds. It was in the news because there was so much paper in the RFP that it took a delivery van to deliver it. Why it has to be delivered by paper and not just burned onto a CD or put onto a Zip drive, I'm not sure. When you think about it, a 3,700-pound 10,000-page RFP was submitted.
Leonardo bid on it. Airbus bid on it, and they got the contract. Leonardo sued the government. It turned out that Airbus had overbid by a billion dollars and actually added components and features to the bid that were not asked for. They won with a $4-billion bid on a $3-billion cap. You have to wonder. At 3,700 pounds and 10,000 pages, what the hell could they have possibly left out such that Airbus found an extra billion dollars' worth of features? You'd think that with 10,000 pages of an RFP you would cover everything possible, not only for fixed-wing search and rescue, but tanks and surface combatants.
Anyway, Airbus got the deal. Surprisingly enough, part of the Airbus deal was a big contract for PAL in Newfoundland, in Judy Foote's riding. Of course, Judy Foote was the procurement minister at the time. Heaven forbid that there be pork-barrelling.
Leonardo sued the government. The government of course denied it, but then out of the blue Leonardo dropped their lawsuit, and lo and behold, guess what Leonardo got? A $5-billion sole-source contract from the Government of Canada. We have Airbus, which was playing footsies with Bombardier at the time and bailing Bombardier out. We've seen the government give $300 million to Bombardier, with which they promptly gave I think $30 million for bonuses.
Money has been poured into Bombardier like it's going out of style. They're in trouble. They can't sell the C Series. I think they had orders for two of them. In walks Airbus, with a non-compliant bid of a billion dollars over, while at the same time they're negotiating to bail out Bombardier. They get the deal—it's probably just coincidence—for a billion dollars more. Leonardo sues us, and the government says it was just a coincidence that they got a $5-billion sole source contract.
Again, that goes back to issues with procurement. There was a recent scandal, and I want to touch on this because I think it goes back to the sole-source thing. When we met with DND officials for a briefing about the combat ships that eventually went to...Irving eventually chose the T26 design. One of the things they told us was that Irving, as the general contractor, could sole-source to itself without government oversight. I asked how that was possible. Their comment was that Irving is so large that they are sometimes the only supplier.
I'm going to again loop back to when I was in the hotel business in order to use an example. When we bid on the Vancouver Olympics, in order to avoid price gouging, the hotel association had to get together and commit a certain percentage of rooms.
They can only charge, basically, inflation added onto the current price. So, you're bidding 10 years out. If the average rate in Vancouver, for the sake of argument, is $200 right now and they're bidding for the Olympics 10 years from now, they're only allowed to add a small percentage on top of the existing one. It stops price gouging from setting rates after the announcement.
You would think the government would have that set up with Irving. If Irving is the only one that can do the business and they'll sole-source from themselves, there has to be some proof that this is the normal rate they offer everyone else, and that they do not just charge what they want. But it turns out the government has no oversight on this. The comment from PSPC—and to this day, I find this just dumbfounding—was “Irving has given us their word that they won't do that.”
Now, I'm pretty sure every oligarchy through time has always been upfront and honest about charging government when they have a monopoly. Sure, you can have people thinking the point of having a monopoly is to gouge people and charge what you want, but I think when you look at the government and Irving, it's just, well, you know, “They've given us their word, so it's not a problem.”
I actually sat down after that with the head of Irving and asked him about that, and he actually denied that. So Irving or PSPC, one of the two, is either incompetent or lying about it. Hanlon's Razor says to never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, so maybe Hanlon's Razor is in effect here, and one of the two is incompetent. But there is that blurring of lines between where the government ends and where, perhaps, the interests of Irving begin and where the interests of PSPC, the bureaucrats, are.
Of course, we all know of the Admiral Norman issue, in which our friends at Irving were quite involved, SNC-style, in discussions with the former Treasury Board president, Mr. Brison. That's quite remarkable they would go after Admiral Norman, even though Admiral Norman wasn't in the meeting in which the leak occurred. I think he was ten time zones away in Europe at the time.