Mr. Speaker, I am rising to speak about a question I asked in the House concerning the options report for the F-35 jets. This relates to the government's effort two years ago to essentially prorogue the program of the F-35 purchases.
Why did the government want to prorogue that program? It was because the heat got pretty hot. This has been a systemic failure of a procurement project for military equipment of essentially massive proportions, and the government was caught out. It provided information that according to the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Officer was not true and in fact represented a government that was keeping two sets of books, one for internal consumption and one for the public.
To avoid the scrutiny of the House and the media, the government did what it called a reset to re-examine the options for replacing the CF-18s.
This has been an incredible failure to deliver by the government, with example after example in the area of military equipment causing a growing lack of confidence by industry in the government's ability to manage military equipment procurement. It is causing troops to have to use aging equipment, which can be dangerous, as we saw with the Protecteur, a supply ship on the Pacific coast that burst into flames in mid-sea.
Let us go back to the F-35 purchase decision.
First, the government never addressed the question of “Why jets?”, not just what jets. It went right to a particular product and went full bore ahead to purchase it. “Why jets?” would be an appropriate question to address and to consult on. What is government's predicted need for defence equipment 10, 20, 30, and 40 years from now, and what kind of equipment would serve that need?
These questions were never asked. There was no statement of requirements that would determine what the replacement for the CF-18s would be required to accomplish. Instead, there was a sole source of a very expensive product called the F-35, which was still under development.
Second, this was based on the misinformation that we, being Canada, were already committed to a contract for the F-35. That was simply not true, even though that was the justification put forward by the Prime Minister himself and the Minister of National Defence.
Third, there was no competition, so there was no opportunity for other providers of potential replacements for the F-35 to demonstrate that their products could meet those requirements that had not actually been articulated.
Last, the cost of this particular program has been zooming into the stratosphere. First it was to be $9 billion, then $16 billion, then $29 billion, then $46 billion, and now two think tanks are telling us that this is still underestimating the true cost.
Why not at least start being transparent and put the report forward, as I asked in my question?