1. Open-up the non-contractually-binding umbrella agreements with Irving and Seaspan.
2. Cancel the Canadian Surface Combatant design competition and re-launch the entire procurement as an expedited fixed-price competition involving completely off-the-shelf designs.
3. Cancel the Joint Support Ship design contract and re-launch an expedited fixed-price competition for the immediate conversion of a second container ship into a supply ship.
4. Shelve the plan to build a heavy polar icebreaker in Vancouver and launch an expedited fixed-price competition for the conversion or construction of 4-5 medium icebreakers.
The good news is that #4 is now being taken up.
Davie Shipyard gets contract for three commercial icebreakers for Canadian Coast Guard. Considering how far behind the NSP is, this is good, though I suspect at least a big a consideration was cushioning economic damage to certain ridings from Trump's Tarriffs. [Trumpiffs?]. Though, the Byers doc also had this to say:
In October 2017, the CBC reported that internal documents prepared for the federal cabinet had warned that a failure to replace the icebreaker fleet could result in the ports of Montreal and Quebec City being partly cut off in the winter months. This would have devastating consequences for the economy as well as the provincial government’s $9 billion maritime strategy.
So there is also that, and the overly meddled with polar icebreakers are still in the pipe. Still good news is good news! As long as these new ships are ordered off the shelf, they should be fine.
Irving shipyard workers ratify new contract, avoiding work stoppage. The pay increases sound consummate with inflation; so that's good.
Vice Admiral Norman has been officially removed from his position.
With the Admiral's lawsuit against the fed this was likely inevitable (the good ol' 'we will pay your full salary and you don't have to work' dodge clearly didn't work; amusingly Admiral Norman was trying to access a federal civil service lawsuit fund to, er, fund his lawsuit against the federal government, which was likely the reason.
The Canadian Army has a C6 shortage. Known in America as the M240, known in Belgium originally as FN MAG, the C6 shortage was caused by Canada donating the machine guns to Ukraine. The numbers are not clear, but evidently it was "most of them." Canada had already planned to replace its C6s with a modern update from Colt Canada the CF is calling C6A1 FLEX, but they are due to arrive in 2019. 1,148 machine guns are on order.
This is not the first time a shortage has cropped up, with the CF issuing an appeal in the Ottawa area for spare rucksacks and sleeping bags. This was because Canada has donated quite a bit of equipment to Ukraine (good!) and - guess what - is being really slow at replacing it. (not good!) [Hat tip to someone who let me know Ukrainians are not cool with 'the Ukraine' anymore, if they ever were, many thanks.]
Canada's deployed peacekeeping force at all time low. This is somewhat conspicuous, as lots of our Allies, rightly or wrongly, want Canada in on the Saharan mission. If you want a good article, the BBC did a long read on the subject. The Sahara is in a cross of terrorism and climate change problems right now, not to mention immigration to Europe.
More NSP reading, let me just block quote a section of that paper I linked to last time:
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6. Fincantieri & Naval Group
A recent intervention by Italy and France should have stood the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) project on its head. According to a report by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, the two foreign governments bypassed the procurement process to make a proposal that could save Canadian taxpayers more than $30 billion.
Together, Italy’s Fincantieri and France’s Naval Group make the FREMM frigate, which is already in operation with the Italian, French, Moroccan and Egyptian navies. According to Pugliese, the consortium proposes to build 15 FREMM frigates at Irving’s Halifax Shipyard for a fixed price of $30 billion. Canadian technology would be used on the ships and some of the existing European technology would be transferred to the Canadian companies involved, enabling them to be involved in future sales of FREMM frigates to other countries.
The proposal is a modified version of one that Fincantieri made in 2016 for a fixed-priced competition whereby the first three CSCs would be built outside of Canada with Canadian technologies included, and the remaining 12 ships would be built at the Halifax Shipyard. The Liberal government rejected that proposal out of hand. However, this was before the same government acknowledged that the projected cost of the CSCs has climbed from the original $26 billion to as much as $60 billion.
Unfortunately, the Liberal government has also rejected the second Italian and French proposal out of hand. On 5 December 2017, it issued the following statement:
"Establishing and respecting a bid and evaluation process that is consistently applied to all potential bidders is fundamental to a fair, open and transparent procurement. ... The submission of an unsolicited proposal at the final hour undermines the fair and competitive nature of this procurement suggesting a sole source contracting arrangement. Acceptance of such a proposal would break faith with the bidders who invested time and effort to participate in the competitive process, put at risk the Government’s ability to properly equip the Royal Canadian Navy and would establish a harmful precedent for future competitive procurements. To be clear, any proposals submitted outside of the established competitive process will not be considered."
The government’s reasons for dismissing the Italian and French proposal might make sense if the cost-saving involved in the proposal was less than 20 percent of the current projected cost. But a cost saving of 50 percent is difficult to ignore. Among other things, it confirms that the procurement to date has not been “fair and competitive”, since it has hardly forced the bidding companies to offer the lowest possible price.
Moreover, the government assumes that following up on the Fincantieri and Naval Group offer necessitates “a sole source contracting arrangement”. There is, in fact, an easy way to seize the opportunity for $30 billion in cost savings within a competitive framework, by: (1) opening-up the non-contractually binding umbrella agreement with Irving and (2) launching an expedited fixed-price competition involving completely off-the-shelf designs. The ships would still be built in Irving’s Halifax Shipyard but the prime contractor would be the winning bidder.
Not seizing upon the significant cost savings made available by Fincantieri and Naval Group is both irrational and irresponsible. $30 billion is a staggering amount of money—more, indeed, than the original budget for the entire National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy. Other companies can still be allowed to submit competitive bids, provided that those bids include fixed-prices and completely off-the-shelf designs and are submitted on a short timeline.
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Trudeau says no to doubling military budget. I actually think the 2% GDP goal is good, definitely a broken clock being right twice a day, but Trudeau doesn't have much choice right now but to say no, given how things are with America currently. But:
Trudeau received some political backing from Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis, whose country meets the benchmark and has openly said it is prepared to spend more.
He said the GDP percentage doesn't matter and it's all about capability.
Which means we are turbofucked. Our nation does spend on national defense - but we get catastrophically bad value for the money. (See above.) We also take spending on actual capability as a want, not a need, as political baksheesh is always more important. (Also see above.)
This one is messy: NEB is sadly not a program for the construction of Canadian Airships, but the National Energy Board. NEB regulates inter-provincial and international energy production (so pipelines, electrical transmission lines etc.) It was supposed to be independent from politics, with a mandate to develop energy production to the "benefit of all Canadians" but since the Harper administration has fallen into disrepute. [footnotes: a shitload of messy politics where nobody looks good.] Anyway, the Canadian Army General who once had David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen reporter on the defense beat investigated by the secret squirrel squad of the RCMP for a month over the disclosure of "secret documents" (that Pugliese googled and got off a government website, and Pugliese told the RCMP that) has...done it again. This General, now VP in charge of NEB's “transparency and strategic engagement” (because if you are a Fed who lashes out at reporters when they discover embarrassing shit OF COURSE you would give them that job) has had to resign. He's once again had a reporter "investigated for state secrets nonsense", this time reporter Dan De Souza:
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quote:
De Souza had revealed that NEB management hired private investigators – on your tax dollar – to find out who leaked to him information that one of the top NEB officials joked about giving NEB staff Tasers so they could deal with oil pipeline protesters.
Shortly after that, De Souza did an article about how the NEB violated his privacy and provided his private banking information to a third party.
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quote:
That prompted the NEB to spend $24,150 of your tax dollars to hire Presidia, an Ottawa security firm, to try to hunt down De Souza’s sources. (Presidia, which has a number of former military police officer on staff, ultimately failed to find the journalist’s source).
The security firm was hired by Sylvain Bedard, who had worked closely with Touchette at DND and was a key player in the Canadian Forces Public Affairs leadership as he was Director General Public Affairs.
Last year Touchette defended the $24,150-contract to Presidia, telling the National Observer it was a good idea to hire a private security firm to investigate her own staff.
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The civil servants behind this clown show were of course rewarded:
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Quote:
Later, Bedard took an extended leave of absence but the NEB would not provide an explanation for that. NEB spokeswoman Kiley declined to say whether taxpayers were paying Bedard’s salary (estimated to be around $150,000 annually) during that leave period. She told Defense Watch that is considered personal information under the Privacy Act.----------------------------------------------------------
[...]
Touchette left for a new executive job in Paris with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, De Souza has reported.
Clearly if you are willing to do any dirty deed for your political masters regardless of how ill-advised or dumb, you are the best kind of person by the lights of the Federal civil service. You can see procurement issues as partially as a subset of the wider corruption in the federal civil service.
Related: How do you unfuck a culture? Asking for a friend. The Phoenix pay system scandal is so bad one expert wants the top level civil servants mass fired, and I gotta agree with his reasoning. The federal civil service culture is so squalidly toxic, the only real solution to changing it is threatening pensions and firing - not retiring, firing - all civil servants entangled with fed corruption, which in a service that selects for loyalty and minion-ness above all others, is going to be the senior staff.
This tirade actually still has something to do with defense.
Right: Britain has been turning a blind eye to political assassination in their own country.
Why? The most likely reason is that Russian dark money in Britain's real estate market is backstopping the whole thing from collapse, though when it comes to Russian dark money, maybe it's just bribery. Anything seems possible post Brexitential crisis!
Chinese and Russian dark money is proving to be the preferred method for corrupting and wrecking their rivals for one simple reason: it strikes the west's weak spot.
Let's say, for a moment, you wanted to freeze/expel/ban the dark money. You could do this very easily. But then, the directors of said dark money would just hide and launder it in off-shore tax havens. Then they could continue business as usual. The *next* move, of course, would be to legislatively crack down on off shore tax havens, even reform banking rules to eliminate them. This, of course, would enrage the 0.01%, who are of course personified in the political elite. Any policy that impacts their ever increasing returns on investment is of course unthinkable by our political elite, even when the reason is national security and sovereignty. And so the 0.01% - and their members in the political elite - side with despotic oligarchs against their own nation.
Oh! And this: Canada will not collect $44 billion it is owed this year.
That's 18 Super Hornets, for example, instead of trying to buy scrap aircraft from the Australians. This is crazy in of itself, but the absolute spit take is this:
Quote:
It is also separate from the unknown amount of tax evaded through the use of offshore tax havens and other tax dodges — something which other CRA programs are pursuing.
Considering in the linked article the government isn't increasing CRA funding to collect all that the "no contest" debt it is owed, I'm sure they are *really* trying to nail those really rich tax cheats.
Further reading
