In an email exchange with The Hill Times clarifying an independent review of the F-35 acquisition that Public Works plans to obtain, the department said the outside firm that will carry out the review will be tasked with ensuring only that all of the steps the government has taken since the July, 2010, Cabinet decision to buy the F-35s will be under scrutiny.
“This exercise will ensure that the steps taken since July 2010 in the acquisition process have been conducted in accordance with applicable government policies, procedures and regulations,” the department said in an email to The Hill Times late Tuesday night.
The email was in response to a Hill Times report about an earlier Public Works description of the independent validation that suggested the review, to be done over this coming winter into 2013 following a separate independent review of cost estimates for the fleet of 65 warplanes, would extend back through all of the steps Public Works and the Department of National Defence took that led to the 2010 Cabinet approval of the F-35 acquisition.
The NDP opposition and a former National Defence assistant deputy minister who has championed a competition to select a replacement for Canada’s 30-year-old Boeing F-18 fighters said the initial terms of the review, as Public Works described to The Hill Times, suggested the government intended to hire an outside auditing firm to either verify or dispute Mr. Ferguson’s findings.
“The goal of the exercise is to review the steps taken to date in the acquisition process of this project to ensure that relevant government laws, regulations, policies, procedures and directives are being adhered to and to determine whether they were performed in the correct sequence and to clearly explain this to the Canadian public,” the initial Public Works description of the review said.
“The validation exercise will determine whether everything required to support a decision has been done and in the event that any outstanding gaps are identified, it will suggest possible corrective actions,” it said.
NDP MP Matthew Kellway (Beaches-East York, Ont.) and Alan Williams, a former assistant deputy minister for procurement in National Defence, took the wording to mean the government intended to hire an outside firm to review Mr. Ferguson’s work, and possibly dispute his findings.
In response to those comments, Public Works said there is no plan to review the decisions that were taken prior to the 2010 cabinet decision.
“The intent of the validation exercise is to determine whether the shortcomings identified by the Auditor General in his report have in fact been addressed, and if not to propose corrective action,” the department’s email said.
“The OAG [Office of the Auditor General] report covered activities that occurred between January 2001 and July 2010. This exercise will ensure that the steps taken since July 2010 in the acquisition process have been conducted in accordance with applicable government policies, procedures and regulations,” it said in full.
A government source told The Hill Times last week the Cabinet decision has not been cancelled. The Hill Times emailed Public Works on Wednesday to confirm the Cabinet decision has not been rescinded. A reply had not been received by Wednesday afternoon.
Cabinet made the decision to acquire the F-35 after four years of consideration, work and initial pre-acquisition decisions, including a 2006 National Defence recommendation to the government that the F-35 was the only aircraft that could meet Canada’s future defence needs.
The controversial stealth aircraft, still being tested and developed by Texas-based Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defence supplier, has experienced significant delays, and U.S. military experts have questioned whether it will be able to meet the level of sophistication and air combat and attack supremacy that Lockheed Martin has promised.
Mr. Ferguson’s April report kicked off a three-month Parliamentary standoff, with the opposition parties calling for a new competition. The government produced a “seven-point plan” the same day Mr. Ferguson’s report came out, establishing a secretariat within Public Works that would take over supervision of the project, even though the three deputy ministers in charge of the secretariat had been at the centre of the decisions that came under withering fire from the auditor general.
Among other things, he chided Public Works for accepting a one-page, 150-word letter, from National Defence as confirmation the F-35 was the only aircraft that could meet Canada’s new fighter-jet requirements. The letter allowed Public Works to skirt procurement law that otherwise would have required a competition with bids from other fighter jet firms and instead go ahead with a sole-source acquisition.
In announcing the new secretariat, the government promised it would consider “all options” to replace the F-18 fighter jets and, as late as last week Conservative MP Chris Alexander (Ajax-Pickering, Ont.), Parliamentary secretary to Defence Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.) claimed the government had not made a decision to acquire the F-35.
While Cabinet announced the acquisition plan in 2010, the government has not yet signed a contract to order the aircraft under the terms of a written agreement between nine countries that have formed a consortium to develop the F-35, including Canada and the United States.
Mr. Williams said the Public Works emailed statement that limits the acquisition review to post-2010 steps in the procurement leaves no doubt the government intends to go ahead with the F-35 acquisition. Mr. Williams and other experts said last week the F-35s will cost Canada between $40-billion and $50-billion over the aircraft’s lifetime.
“They are basically ignoring everything the auditor general said and just making sure that the decision that they have taken to buy the F-35, that they don’t do anything, in following through on that decision, that would violate policy or legislation,” Mr. Williams said.
“In other words they are going to just forget about what they have done and say, ‘We want the F-35, so let’s make sure that from here on in nothing we do can be criticized, and that’s very easy to do,” he said. “This re-confirms it, that ‘This is the way it’s going to be, we’ve made our decision and now we will make sure that nobody can fault us from July 10 forward and point to something that we did that is not consistent.’”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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