Military brass is overpaying for the procurement of everything from warships and fighter jets to pickup trucks and sleeping bags.
Who pays the price?
Taxpayers.
And the recruits with holes in their boots.
The federal government is wasting billions of dollars on ineffective procurement processes that leave our soldiers in a lurch while screwing over taxpayers with cost overruns.
More money spent overpaying for procurements means higher taxes and less for our military and the personnel who defend us.
And make no mistake, Canada is overpaying for military procurements.
Take the new fleet of warships being built for the Royal Canadian Navy – the River Class Destroyers. The Canadian River Class is based on the British Type 26 Frigates.
The Brits are paying between $1.5 and $2.2 billion in Canadian dollars per ship.Meanwhile, Canada is paying upwards of $5.3 billion per ship, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
That means we’re paying double what the Brits are, even though we are copying their existing design. That’s like copying the smart kids’ homework and still taking twice as long to do it.
If we paid the same amount per ship as the British did for the 15 ships of the River Class, we’d save about $40 billion in procurement costs. That’s twice as much money as the federal government sends to Ontario in health-care transfer payments.
That means the federal government is spending twice as much money overpaying for ships than it is on health care for our biggest province.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government bungled F-35 fighter jet procurement is another example of taxpayers losing out on military procurement contracts.
In 2010, the Harper government announced plans to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets for an inflation-adjusted cost of $190.8 million per unit.
The Liberal government canceled that procurement when it came to power. Fast forward to 2023 and the Trudeau government announced the purchase of 88 F-35s at an inflation-adjusted cost of $229.6 million per unit.
That massive increase in cost was totally avoidable if the Liberals would have just kept the Harper-era contract.
And it’s not just big-ticket procurements like a new fleet of warships or fighter jets that are leaving Canadians with big cost overruns.
Something as simple as the army’s attempt to replace an aging fleet of off-the-shelf pickup trucks and Mercedes G-Wagons is years behind schedule with a budget possibly doubling initial estimates.
Initially, the cost to replace off-the-shelf pickup trucks and Afghanistan-era, lightly armoured G-Wagons was pegged at $499 million. Now, that budget has ballooned to somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion, according to media reports.
Buying off-the-shelf pickup trucks and a G-Wagon replacements will have taken 13 years, assuming no more delays.
How does the budget to replace pickup trucks that can be bought at any Chevrolet dealership double? And how on earth does it take the government 13 years to do it?
Because so much budget is wasted overpaying for big ticket items like ships, jets and trucks, soldiers aren’t getting the basics they need to keep Canadians safe.
The defence department bureaucrats can’t even figure out how to buy sleeping bags for our soldiers. National Defence spent $34.8 million buying sleeping bags that were unusable because they were not warm enough for Canadian winters.
Recently, Canadian soldiers sent to Ottawa for training had to rely on donated scraps of food because the military wasn’t able to feed them. Soldiers have gone months without seeing reimbursements for expenses, because of bureaucratic incompetence in our cash-strapped armed forces.
As a young university student, I joined the army reserve and was issued a hand-me-down pair of boots with rips in the soles and a list of former owners and their serial numbers that extended all the way around the inside of the boots.
Taxpayers are paying too much. The boots on the ground have holes. And the military procurement process is a dumpster fire of burning cash.
Canadian taxpayers and soldiers deserve better.
National Post
Carson Binda is the B.C. Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.