Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much to all of our witnesses for being here today.
I'm going to use some of my time to walk Canadians through the timeline of the fighter jet program in an effort to evaluate whether mismanagement of this program has cost Canada and Canadians our sovereignty.
We know that in the beginning, in 1997, Canada participated, in varying degrees, under the U.S.-led F-35 joint strike fighter program. This was a move that Conservatives and many Canadians supported. We agreed that Canada should participate and stand with allies in NATO and the Five Eyes alliance.
It was during the former Conservative government in 2010 that then defence minister Peter MacKay announced that Canada would purchase 66 F-35s and participate alongside our allies in this program. Ultimately, after an inflated report from the PBO in 2010, the government at the time opted to pause the contract and open competition on the F-35 program, leading us to 2015, when mismanagement delays and politicization truly began.
Upon entering office, the government cancelled the F-35 contract and took us back to square one. However, this time, this was behind schedule with our allies and at the cost of our security.
The new solution was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars examining different fighter jets and upgrading existing CF-18s, which have been described as aging and increasingly unreliable, so much so today that nearly 40% sit out of service. The government even bought used fighter jets from Australia to keep our existing fleet in the air.
In 2018, the Auditor General released a report entitled “Canada's Fighter Force”. The biggest take-away was that the Liberal government must invest in and create a robust strategic plan to recruit and train service personnel and pilots to operate not only the future jets but those that were currently in our possession.
Then, in early 2023, seven years after emphatically stating that the Liberals would not buy the F-35 fighter jet, Minister Anand announced that this government would do exactly that—this time, however, at a higher cost and on a delayed timeline.
Still, members on this side—recognizing the importance of the F-35s, as we did during the Harper government—supported the move and urged the Liberals to move quickly with their acquisition of the jets and to ensure that the critical security infrastructure upgrades needed to host the F-35s on Canadian soil were taking place.
This brings us to 2025. As one of his first acts, the Prime Minister picked up on Trudeau's mismanagement and announced a re-examination of the F-35 purchase. He told Canadians that by the end of the summer a decision would be made on the program's future.
Well, it's now October 7, and both our air force and our allies are waiting to know where the program stands. That leads to us today, 15 years after Conservatives announced the original F-35 purchase, beginning our study on the Auditor General's June report, a report that shows that the cost of this program, which was projected to cost $19 billion in 2022, has now skyrocketed to a minimum of $33.2 billion, a 57% increase, before a single jet has been delivered. It is my conclusion that the mismanagement of this program has come not only at a massive cost to taxpayers but with a cost to our country's security and sovereignty.
With that, Lieutenant-General, as commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, do you believe that the management of this program and the consistent backtracking to date have left your service members in the best position possible to defend our country and its sovereignty?