Former Canadian Military Procurement Chiefs Slam Fighter Jet Plan

OTTAWA --- Two former heads of military procurement have slammed the Liberal government's plan to buy 18 Super Hornet fighter jets as a legally dubious waste of taxpayer dollars.

The Liberals announced this week that the government will launch an open competition next year to replace all 77 of the air force's CF-18s — a process that's expected to last up to five years.

In the meantime, they say they will enter negotiations to purchase Boeing Super Hornets without a competition because the air force is facing a critical shortage of warplanes, which poses an "urgent" need.

Such a need is one of the few exceptions in the federal procurement law that lets the government purchase new military equipment as a stop-gap until a full competition can be held.

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But in separate interviews, Alan Williams and Dan Ross said they don't believe there really is an urgent need, because the government could pick a new fighter jet through an open competition in two years or less.

"I question the whole legality of this," said Williams, who served as assistant deputy minister of materiel at National Defence from 2000 to 2005 and has been a vocal critic of sole-sourcing defence contracts.

"Holding a competition within a year is even doable. It's not like you're starting everything all over again." (end of excerpt)

Click here for the full story, on the National Newswatch website.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Alan Williams, one of the two assistant ministers quoted above, further explained in a Nov 23 e-mail that “The government is wrong when it claims that an ‘urgent’ need allows it to bypass competition.” He added that:
“The specific wording in article 506.11(a) in the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) reads in part as follows: "Where an unforeseeable sense of urgency exists..."
Note the word "unforeseeable". Bad planning is not an excuse for sole-sourcing. A "capability gap" that was allowed to grow over many years is hardly "unforeseeable".
The AIT article was designed to allow for sole-sourcing in the event, for example, that the government announced that it was sending our troops into a theatre of operation and there would be insufficient time to conduct competitions to provide the troops with the goods and services they require.)

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