In addition to the ships’ more than doubled price tag, delivery will take twice as long. Worse, to date no one has been held accountable for this fiasco.
I recommend that the government establish a risk-management framework for federal public service contracts that assigns a risk to each factor. The higher the total risk, the higher the level of approval necessary to proceed with the service contract.
In this mock memo to federal Defence Minister Bill Blair, Alan Williams, a former assistant deputy minister of materiel at DND, suggests a radical change in how DND proposes to acquire the 15 Canadian Surface Combatant ships, and cut costs.
The last policy lacked the two key things necessary for implementation: it wasn’t fully funded and lacked agile and timely decision-making processes. That these shortcomings exist is hardly a matter for debate.
To say federal contracting can get a little complicated is an understatement. The factors that help distinguish the good service contracts from the bad ones include assessing the contract’s purpose, business case, expected value, duration, and the method of procurement.
The $19-billion fleet of F-35s is a prime opportunity for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to take the federal government to task and show true leadership on this file. Instead, he is facing a two-strike count.
The Government Operations and Estimates Committee is especially well-positioned to set the agenda and investigate critical defence matters as it is chaired by a member of the opposition party.
