Mr. Chair and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to share our comments as part of your important study.
Many of you know that Bombardier is a leader in the aerospace industry. In fact, Bombardier designs, manufactures and services the world’s finest business jets. We currently contribute $5.7 billion to Canada’s GDP and support 33,000 Canadian jobs.
Perhaps you don't know that Bombardier has a track record of delivering versatile defence solutions that are recognized globally for proven reliability, endurance, performance and capability in all areas of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Bombardier has more than 550 special mission and defence jets in service worldwide, including with the United States air force and army. Therefore, we have a unique perspective on defence procurement processes around the world.
Before beginning any procurement process, the Government of Canada should proactively engage in a thorough consultation with Canadian industry to understand where homegrown innovation opportunities exist. When this is not done, government consistently defaults to off-the-shelf products—often imported and utilizing older technologies.
This is a crucial point in the context of answering military readiness. Too often, our current procurement approach starts too late, is not strategic and results in the acquisition of equipment that is just good enough, rather than the best most cutting-edge solution, and in an approach that is way too complicated.
One example of this is Canada's multi-mission aircraft procurement: CMMA. In February 2022, PSPC released a CMMA request for information outlining 13 high-level mandatory requirements and asking industry to deliver full operational capacity by 2040. Bombardier and our partner, General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada, responded to this RFI in good faith. We put forward a made-in-Canada solution that exceeds all high-level requirements and the published delivery timeline.
Unfortunately, it turns out that this RFI was entirely misleading. The government went silent following our RFI responses, and in late 2022 news broke that they may be pursuing sole-source contracting for Boeing's American-made P-8.
The CMMA procurement process we've observed to date is deeply flawed and lacking transparency. Flaws were disclosed recently by government testimony to the standing committee on operations and governance. First, the RFI clearly states that it is not a pre-selection process and there would be no short-listing of potential suppliers based on responses, yet officials made clear that this was the RFI's very objective from day one.
Second, we learned that government has made critical changes to the CMMA procurement without formally advising Canadian industry, including expediting the final delivery timeline from 2040 to the early 2030s. Making military off-the-shelf products a mandatory criteria also was not initially mentioned. Both changes are clearly driving a biased predetermined outcome in favour of Boeing. By the way, Bombardier and GDMS can meet this expedited timeline, a fact that seems to fall on deaf ears at PSPC and DND.
Finally, we learned that officials concluded that Canadian industry cannot meet CMMA requirements before ever releasing the RFI, based on a third party study market assessment by Avascent, which has never been made public. We are completely rejecting this conclusion, as not one qualified aerospace engineer evaluated our solution—not to inform the Avascent report nor at any point afterward.
On behalf of the Canadian industry, we simply recommend what is required by Canadian law: an open, unbiased call for tender with objective and realistic selection criteria. Bombardier and GDMS want to compete, because we will win and deliver the next-generation global gold standard for decades to come to the Canadian Armed Forces.
Improving Canadian defence procurement to support military readiness must start with an open CMMA tender.
Thank you.