To the Editor:
It was two-and-a-half years ago - way back in mid-2010 - when Liberals stood alone to question the Harper government's secretive, headlong rush to spend mega-billions buying a fleet of "stealth" warplanes.
The whole thing just didn't smell right. Yes, the RCAF's existing CF-18 fighter-jets are ageing and will have to be replaced within 10 years or so. But the government provided no explanation of the defense and foreign policy mandates our airforce will be expected to discharge in the decades going forward, nor how this particular airplane is best suited to fill those needs.
Worse still, contrary to all the rules, the Conservatives insisted on "sole-sourcing" this purchase. In other words, there would be no competitive bidding process among several potential aircraft manufacturers; instead, the government would just hand the contract to Lockheed-Martin corporation - making this the biggest boondoggle in military procurement in Canadian history.
Liberals repeatedly asked questions about the purpose for this purchase, the technical specifications, the constantly ballooning costs, and the government's non-competitive procedure that bypassed at least four other major international suppliers.
In his usual surly way, Mr. Harper accused every questioner of being disloyal to Canada and our military. Worse still, the Conservatives were deliberately deceitful about the money. They kept two sets of figures to hide the true horrendous costs.
But despite all the stonewalling, the truth began to trickle out in a skeptical analysis earlier this year by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). His findings were later confirmed by the Auditor-General. They systematically demolished all the phony stories about costs starting at $9-billion, rising to $16-billion, and then $25-billion and more.
The government scrambled to get yet another opinion. So now there's a private sector audit by KPMG, setting the real expense at something over $40-billion.
This bungled project destroys any notion of Mr. Harper and his regime being good economic managers. Their arrogance and incompetence have exposed taxpayers to huge, unnecessary risks. And then they tried desperately to hide it, until the PBO and the Auditor-General blew the whistle on their years of deceit.
In a rare moment of candour last week, the Public Works Minister admitted to Parliament that Conservative "openness and transparency" on the F-35 fiasco began only AFTER the Auditor-General laid bare their chicanery.
Ralph Goodale, MP, Wascana, SK.
