It Was Bound to Happen

Well, I knew it was going to happen sometime. Last year, the Tory government announced its plans to provide the Canadian Forces with four Boeing C-17 strategic transports. This week, the politics of defence procurement is coming to the fore, in the newspapers at least.

To be sure, the initial decision was controversial. Some argued that Canada did not need to purchase the aircraft (which are capable of carries heavy loads, including tanks, for incredible distances). Others felt the Canadian government should sign a leasing arrangement with Skylink Aviation to use their fleet of Russian-built strategic transports. Still others favoured the Airbus A400 as an aircraft that could replace the aging C-130 fleet as well as add a strategic lift capacity.

In the end, the government chose to buy Boeing, at a cost of $3.4 billion for four C-17 aircraft. The Skylink option was, for various reasons, deemed unworkable, and the A400 is still in the design stages and will not fly for quite some time. The C-17, it seems, is the only choice.

This is where it gets interesting: there were two stories related to the purchase that made the news this week. In the first one, several politicians from Quebec vocally commented that la belle province had better get "its" share of the industrial offsets, since Quebec has 60% of the nation's aerospace industry.

Of course, they did not mention that part of the reason Quebec has such a large share is because the Tory government choose to award a large CF-18 contract to a Quebec firm for political purposes, even though it was inferior and more expensive to a bit from a Manitoba company. Nor did they mention any of the "corporate welfare" benefits that Montreal aerospace giant Bombardier has received over many years.

This first story is rather predictable, and will likely be repeated when the Navy awards the Joint Support Ship (JSS) contract. The second story is rather a surprise. Canada is the beneficiary of a very generous act on the part of the United States Air Force. The USAF, it has been reported, has allowed Canada to "cut in line" so that we can obtain our four C-17s by the end of next year. Had they not done so, Canada would not have received the airplanes until much later. It appears that Canada is getting rewarded for taking accountability and investing money in its own defence.