Matthew Kellway

[National Defence, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I guess the answer is no. No one will take responsibility for misleading Canadians and no one will take responsibility for suppressing information to Parliament's independent watchdogs. Instead, the Minister of National Defence says that buying a fleet of fighter jets is like buying a minivan and, by the way, he has offered accounting tips to the Auditor General, who apparently has it all wrong.

For how much longer will the government keep up the ridiculous claims that the PBO cannot do his job and the AG cannot count?

[National Defence, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the government's answers are making less sense and getting more convoluted daily. At least there are others willing to tell the truth.

Today, when the PBO was asked if the government was seeking to mislead Canadians about the real cost of the F-35s, he gave a clear and simple answer, yes. Is there any minister on that side of the House who is honest enough to stand and take responsibility?

[National Defence, May 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the only thing coming clear here is that the government has our civil service caught up in its web of contradictions.

In 2010, DND wrote to Public Works saying that the F-35 is the only option. Public Works agreed. Yet, both departments came before committee yesterday saying that they were still analyzing their options. No decision has been made yet. However, the chief of the air staff contradicted both departments. He is fixed on the F-35.

Is the government misleading the chief of the air staff, or is it misleading Canadians?

[National Defence, April 26th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague across the aisle for staying late on a Thursday night to respond to my questions but she has proven herself just as adept as her other colleagues across the aisle at avoiding responses to these matters.

I would point out that, in the Auditor General's report, he identifies that the joint strike fighter program office provides National Defence with projected sustainment costs over 36 years. These are called bilateral cost breakdowns. These have been received by the Department of National Defence for some years.

I also note that the government has committed in this House to abide by the recommendations of the report and has agreed and committed to making the estimates and actual costs of the F-35 available to the public. Will my friend across the aisle undertake to do just that with the bilateral cost breakdowns that are already in the possession of her government?

[National Defence, April 26th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I am here tonight to continue the ongoing discussion of the F-35 and to talk about developmental delays and their impact on cost estimates for the F-35.

Those developmental delays are taking place because the joint strike fighter program is in a shambles. This has been identified in the recent report from the Auditor General. More significantly, we have the word of the program's executive officer, U.S. Vice-Admiral Venlet, who has acknowledged that the program's high degree of concurrency was “a miscalculation”. The program is already in its fifth procurement plan. The first procurement plan projected 1,600 F-35s in the skies today. As it is, there are only 63 prototypes flying.

The concurrency issue impacts directly on program costs. Already, the program has incurred nearly $400 million to correct deficiencies in the few aircraft that have been built. More problematically, as stated by the Government Accountability Office, design changes are expected to “persist at elevated levels through 2019”.

The technology of this plane is still in its infancy, and rigorous testing is still at least three years away. Nobody knows, therefore, what this plane will ultimately cost. The AG's report commented on this. It says:

...many costs are not yet reliably known or cannot yet be estimated. These include the basic...flyaway cost of the aircraft, the cost of Canadian required modifications, and the cost of sustainment.

What we do know, only, is that the price is rising rapidly and that this is a fact that, according to the AG's report, has been hidden from parliamentarians. Further, we know that the government has treated its underestimates as maximums.

Thankfully, the United States joint strike fighter office is transparent with its costing. We know also that it provides all of this costing to the Department of National Defence. Recent figures from the Pentagon show a 5% increase in acquisition costs and a 10% increase in operating and support costs, just since last year. The total F-35 program cost is now $1.5 trillion, with significant cost risks still ahead when more complex software and advanced capabilities are integrated and tested. Given that the F-35 full capabilities as advertised depend on three times as many lines of software code as the F-22A Raptor and six times as much as the F-18 Super Hornet, these risks cannot be overstated. However, herein lies one of the many advantages of an open, transparent and competitive tender for replacing the CF-18. It would reveal just how far from the truth about the F-35 the Canadian public has been held to date, particularly regarding cost.

Not only was the Minister of National Defence's $15 billion life-cycle estimate $10 billion shy of his department's own 20-year life-cycle estimates, but the department's own $25 billion hidden estimate, I might add, is billions of dollars shy of the life-cycle estimate based on the 36 years that the department plans to operate these planes. It remains to be seen, first, what the 36-year life-cycle cost estimate actually is, second, who knows about that 36-year life-cycle cost and, third, who has been involved in hiding the 36-year life-cycle cost that the Auditor General acknowledges that the Department of National Defence has.

[National Defence, April 25th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his response, but it is indeed a worrying response. Two things were fundamentally missed in all of that. First, is the very central point that the Auditor General makes in chapter 2 of his recent report, which is that these two programs have been linked in practical and real terms, that the investment and commitment of almost $1 billion in this developmental program is understood by the Auditor General to be, in reality and practice, actually a commitment by the government to the second program, which is the procurement program.

That is the second worry. If this is really the priority of the government, it has gone around a very troubling and strange way of fulfilling a priority by putting all of its marbles in the F-35 bag.

I would recommend to my colleague that he read the GAO report which talks at length about all the technical difficulties that still call into question, ultimately, the very existence of this plane as a fighter jet.

[National Defence, April 25th, 2012]

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.

[National Defence, April 25th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the air force says there is not going to be enough money to cover pilot training. That is important because those guys know that flying these things is a little more complicated than sitting in one for a photo op.

Let me ask the Minister of National Defence to come out from behind his desk to answer a simple question.

DND's own costing handbook says that a good rule of thumb is to take the acquisition price for the planes and multiply it by four. That is the total life-cycle cost. He may need a calculator for this, but I know the minister can do the math.

Therefore, why did he tell Canadians that this would cost only $15 billion?

[National Defence, April 23rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it looks like Public Works has a new role in military procurement: re-rigging rigged procurement processes.

Witness the F-35 secretariat. Now that it has been caught rigging the replacement for the CF-18s, it is re-rigging it all over again in Public Works this time. As for the latest one, the close combat vehicle, we learned from the fairness monistor, I mean monitor, that it got rigged too.

Why can they not hold open and transparent procurement processes? Are the Conservatives addicted to rigging?

[National Defence, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is true that the Auditor General was in committee today but he was also in scrum in front of the media this morning. In the scrum, he was very clear when he said that the government knew about the $25 billion estimate and that it was lowballing it. He meant the cabinet ministers.

The Conservatives used to say that they stood for ministerial responsibility but not one minister has stood up to say that this happened under his or her watch and that it was his or her responsibility. Will no minister ever stand up and take responsibility for this fiasco?