Was it enough? As they lick their wounds, settle back for the holidays and take stock, Conservatives will be asking themselves whether their F-35 reset did the trick — whether it has inoculated them, at long last, from procurement disease, which has the capacity to cripple Canadian governments like little else can.
It’s early. Previous storms — remember prorogation in 2008 and 2009 — eventually passed. The Harper government’s explicit appeal to a kind of glum pragmatism, which purports to place the arguments for economic stability and security above all others, has proven extraordinarily resilient.
That said, the Tories have cause for concern, it seems to me. Last week’s passion play in Ottawa, with Defence Minister Peter MacKay playing the goat and Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose the heroine, might have been tactically brilliant and persuasive — two years ago. Today, it looks like another ungainly half-measure, seeded with hand grenades waiting to go off.
For starters, the killing of the sole-source F-35 program — which is no mere reset, but rather a wholesale repudiation of the government’s core military-procurement policy of the 2011 campaign — still has Canada within the international consortium of F-35 partners. That brings a price tag of more than $500 million over the life of the program. It does not commit Canada to buying the F-35, and never did. It gives us a seat at the table, and the right to bid on related contracts, of which more than $435 million worth, according to Industry Canada, have been signed so far.
The argument that Canada should remain in this consortium, and indeed continue to invest in it for the industrial benefits, whether or not the RCAF ever acquires the jet, is one that can plausibly be made. But it should have been made back in 2010. For the government to make it now raises an obvious problem.
Why should taxpayers be on the hook for a highly controversial, problem-plagued project that, all over the world, is under review, because of rising costs? Even the Pentagon, which has signed on to buy 2,443 F-35s, is expected to reduce its order. Surely it would be simpler just to opt out, hold a competition, find the best plane available that we can afford and move on. Never mind the Porsche. Buy the Ford F-150.
Except that walking away has consequences too, beyond the Montreal aerospace jobs lovingly referred to by Prime Minister Stephen Harper (which industry sources tell me are not actually at risk, at least not imminently). There is a built-in domino effect: Canada opts out, causing Lockheed-Martin’s price to rise, which causes Japan to opt out, causing the price to rise again, and so on. At the end is program collapse.
But a collapse is unthinkable, because America’s air defence through 2040 and beyond has been predicated on the F-35. In effect, consortium signatories are not free agents. This problem has no easy or obvious solution.
Next, although the new process walks and talks like a competition, it is not one — even though a competition must surely come. The “options analysis” underway cannot realistically lead to a recommendation for another sole-source purchase.
Even if such a move technically were deemed sensible, it would be politically suicidal, given the history. Nothing short of a new statement of requirements, followed by a full international competition, will pass the sniff test. Which begs the question: Why isn’t that happening now? Each additional step adds to the delay, the cost and more controversy.
The third factor is purely political. By that measure, it seems to me, last week’s production was an unmitigated Conservative disaster.
MacKay — the minister most responsible for the mess, by universal agreement — had only to play the part of a contrite public servant who has learned some hard lessons. Instead, he brazened it out, hiding yet again behind Canadian men and women in uniform, who deserve better. Meantime, MacKay’s second in charge, Chris Alexander, continued with his surreal attempts to deny his government ever set a foot wrong on the F-35, let alone lowballed the costs. It was all a regrettable misunderstanding, abetted by “loose talk.”
What these two performances suggest is that, despite the substantial time, money, preparation, forethought and planning that clearly preceded this reversal, the underlying mindset that made it necessary — comprised of excessive partisanship, systematic contempt for critics, a mania for message control and a clench-jawed refusal to acknowledge mistakes — hasn’t changed.
This is something no mere procurement reset can alter. It begs for a top-to-bottom cabinet shuffle, beginning with MacKay, and a reset of the government itself.
