Jean-Yves Duclos is like an intellectual Mount Logan amid the puny foothills of the Trudeau cabinet.
Yet, nine years in politics seems to have only dulled his senses and honed his instinct for evasion.
The public services and procurement minister was a witness at the House of Commons defence committee on Thursday, talking about the ways the federal government is trying to compress the timelines of military purchases, without sacrificing due diligence.
His first question from Conservative MP James Bezan concerned the anti-tank missile system Ottawa bought from Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems earlier this year.
Bezan said Rafael’s SPIKE LR2 system is not as accurate as expected:
“Why weren’t the options tested before we actually procured a system that doesn’t work to the expectations of our armed forces?”
It’s a legitimate question. The system was promised on an “urgent operational requirement” basis for the 1,600 or so Canadian troops in Latvia, who have no effective anti-tank system at their disposal. Similar fast-track contracts were awarded for anti-drone technology and a short-range portable air defence system, which will be delivered to the Forces in Latvia early next year.
But Duclos clearly did not want to talk about the botched anti-tank procurement, instead referring repeatedly to the one per cent of GDP that the Conservatives spent on defence nearly a decade ago, in a very different threat environment.
All is well because the Liberals are on course to spend two per cent of GDP on defence by 2032, he said.
“Canadians will have to ask: do they want to believe fake news or make progress towards our NATO target, for which we have a path and have demonstrated success?” Duclos said.
Any Canadian Forces members watching must have recoiled at the minister’s response.
Nobody, least of all incoming president Donald Trump, gives a damn what Canada spent on defence in 2015.
What they do know is that hitting two per cent eight years from now will be five years too late and multiple billion dollars short.
The question on the anti-tank system deserved a considered response because it gets to the heart of Canada’s procurement problem: how to buy quickly and diligently.
The $44 million Portable Anti-X missile system (PAXM) purchase has proven to be neither quick nor diligent — instead, conforming more closely to the military slang SNAFU (“situation normal: all f-cked up”).
The background is that in March 2023, then defence minister Anita Anand granted a national security exemption from competitive tendering to fast-track the process.
Officials at defence committee had already assured Bezan that a competitive process was taking place.
However, they avoided his question about testing the competing systems in a “shoot off,” saying that the system being purchased had “proven capabilities” and was in service with other allies.
In an email to National Post this week, the Department of National Defence said that in the interests of obtaining the shortest timeline, “there were no live tests or demonstrations planned or performed” as would normally be the case between competing weapons.
“This technical risk was assessed and deemed acceptable, as all the potential bidders had delivered thousands of units of this product to other customers,” the DND statement said.
That would have been fine, if the SPIKE LR2 had worked to the military’s satisfaction.
But it didn’t. DND said that in mid-July, after the contract was announced, “issues with the functionality of the missiles and launchers were identified.”
DND now says it is working with Rafael to address the cause of the issue and deliveries to troops in Latvia have been “delayed slightly” until full operational capability is achieved in January 2026.
Rookie Conservative MP Don Stewart pointed out the most glaring problem with a process that takes seven years to buy a truck, or 10 years to buy a drone.
He said while there is always an element of risk management for the bureaucracy, “most of the risk seems to be tilted towards our soldiers not getting the equipment they need in a timely manner.”
Duclos’ response was as predictable as it was discouraging. “You (the Conservatives) invested less than one per cent ….”
The minister said that the government is in the process of reforming procurement processes, with announcements expected soon.
Another witness, Simon Page, assistant deputy minister of defence and marine procurement, outlined some of the bureaucratic blockages: the underestimation of complexity in the planning stages; the number of departments involved in signing off on procurements; the lack of access to ministers; the requirement to go to Treasury Board for approval on each project, and so on.
A five-minute conversation with any soldier bound for Latvia would tell the minister and his public servants how irrelevant all the political point-scoring and administrative interference is to the people at the sharp end.
Units that only have a quarter of the vehicles and equipment they need are unfit for deployment. Training to even a basic level is not available, which has a knock-on impact on recruitment and retention. “Soldiers join but can’t get the gear they joined to operate,” said one CAF member who is about to deploy.
He said he wants all political parties to give specifics on what they plan to spend on defence and what it will mean to him and his unit at an operational level.
To him, that is far more relevant than what a previous government spent a long time ago in a geopolitical galaxy far, far away.
National Post
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