Madam Speaker, I am again rising to talk about the recent Auditor General's report, in particular, chapter 2, regarding the replacement of the CF-18s. The Auditor General's report laid bare not everything, but enough to confirm that the only responsible path to Canada's next fleet of fighter jets is by way of an open, transparent and competitive tender. The benefit of such a process is the truth, something which has been in short supply to date.
Parliament's independent watchdogs, the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, have been invaluable sources of information to Parliament, and by extension, to Canadians. Within the scope of their offices they have revealed important facts, figures and discrepancies, and pointed to even more. However, full disclosure would be the benefit of an open, transparent and competitive bidding process. What truths would be exposed by such a process?
The first casualty of the government's story to date would be the fiction that the F-35 is a fighter jet. Truth be told, it is at this point in time more a concept than a reality. Flight testing is only about 20% complete with the most challenging flight tests still years off. According to the March 2012 testimony of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, testing is still at the point of verifying that the plane “will work as intended”.
The recent news that the F-35 does not meet at least one of its mandatory requirements missed the point that as of now and for some time into the future, the F-35 does not meet any of the mandatory requirements, unless general airworthiness is one of them.
This is, in essence, the second truth: Nobody really knows when we will be able to determine what requirements the F-35 is capable of meeting. This plane is still very early in its development. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the joint strike fighter's “mission systems and logistics systems are critical to realizing the operational and support capabilities expected by the war fighter, but the hardware and software for these systems are immature and unproven at this time”.
In fact, only 4% of testing has been completed on these critical systems. Similarly, its stealth capabilities are far from proven. According to a recent report in Aviation Week, test flights at design speed in December caused the stealth fibre matting to peel and bubble.
When the Department of National Defence justified sole sourcing the CF-18 replacement on the basis of only one contractor being able to perform the contract, it sole sourced the contract on a fiction. The truth of the matter is that no contractor has a plane capable of performing the contract. It is an open question of whether Lockheed Martin ever will be able to perform the contract and whether it will be able to do so by 2020 when the CF-18 gets grounded. It is best to put this out to tender.